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 Travel & Outdoors | May 2006 
Cancun Desperate to Hold Its Sand
 Chris Hawley - Arizona Republic
| | Engineers are trying to find a way to permanently protect the beach, perhaps with giant underwater barriers. |
Cancun, Mexico - What's a beach resort without a beach?
It's a question that concerns people here in one of the world's biggest tourist destinations, a city locked in a 30-year-long struggle to keep its coastline from washing into the sea.
Last month, workers wrapped up the first part of a gigantic project to restore Cancun's beach after Hurricane Wilma blasted the resort in October. They sucked up sand from a site 20 miles offshore, carried it to Cancun on a ship and used pipes to pump the sand onto the shore.
But experts say it's just a matter of time before nature takes the beach away again. Engineers are trying to find a way to permanently protect the beach, perhaps with giant underwater barriers.
At stake is the largest of the beach resorts that ring Mexico, an international attraction that dwarfs others like Cabo San Lucas, Rocky Point and Mazatlan. Cancun accounts for one-third of all of Mexico's tourism income, more than $3 billion a year.
Cancun's beach problems are not unique, but long-term beach loss would be a catastrophe because the city also is a jobs center for tens of thousands of Mexicans. Tourism pumped about $11 billion into Mexico in 2005. Officials there already attribute a dip in tourism to beach erosion.
"They have to do something," Delfino Mora Sosa, an employee at the Flamingo Hotel, said as he gazed at the new man-made beach from the hotel's roof. "People come here for the beach. Without that, there's no reason to come."
The soft sand and dazzling waters are what inspired the Mexican government to turn Cancun Island into the country's first planned resort in 1974.
Back then, Cancun was little more than a sandbar near the town of Puerto Juarez, on the eastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula. The government built causeways, water treatment plants and a modern airport. Soon, hotels were popping up all along the island.
Cancun now attracts 4.6 million tourists a year, easily outdrawing by more than 3 million visitors the Baja resort area of Los Cabos, which includes Cabo San Lucas.
But Cancun has a special weakness. Unlike resorts such as Acapulco or Ixtapa, which are on the mainland protected by large bays, Cancun's resorts and hotels are on a barrier island, a straight line of sand completely exposed to the Caribbean Sea. Waves keep the sand constantly moving.
Cancun's location puts it in the Caribbean hurricane corridor, and it has been hit several times in the past few decades.
By 2005, Cancun's beach had shrunk from a high of 178 feet in 1973 to 15 feet in some places. |
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