What Cancún’s Tourists Don’t See Is a Sprawling Concrete Jungle

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

The wide mowed lawns and leafy trees, the sports fields shining under their illuminated lights, the bouncy castles in the children’s play areas— especially the bouncy castles—are what Celia Pérez Godínez envies. These are the trappings of the wealthy neighborhood she travels to every day as a domestic worker in Cancún. Pérez envies the rich.

She tells me this sitting on a rotten wooden bench one August afternoon, her 7-year-old son getting his scooter stuck on the broken path here many miles away in the north of the city, in a tiny park. Full of garbage and wild vegetation, it’s a short distance from where Pérez lives, close to the city outskirts. As we talk, a homeless person in the background shouts and laughs as if at a joke only he understands.

Pérez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. She migrated in 2013 to Cancún, Mexico’s over-promoted and hugely popular tourist destination. She rarely has enough time and money to go to the beach and cannot find green areas or decent, safe public spaces for her son to play, having to make do with the few parks, like this, that are available. This is not the life she expected. “You hear that Cancún is wonderful, but when you get here … it’s a disappointment.”

At 54 years old, Cancún is the youngest city in Mexico. It was designed from scratch in the 1970s as a new holiday destination in the country. In this respect, it’s been a wild success. But as an urban project, it is a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, the population of its urban sprawl now exceeds 1 million. Before, much of this area was jungle; today there are hundreds of hotels. Accelerated real-estate development has bitten into the surrounding vegetation year after year.

This growth has been an environmental nightmare but also a social one, giving vastly unequal benefits to the city’s richer and poorer inhabitants. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, an academic at the University of the Caribbean, most people in Cancún live without the minimum green areas or public spaces needed for proper recreation, leisure, rest, or socializing. This is especially true in those regions where the most vulnerable live.

This inequality has evolved despite Cancún’s rapid expansion consuming huge amounts of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding region lost at least 30,000 hectares of jungle, according to data from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. On the land ripped from the jungle there are now residential and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, plenty more developents are on the way. At the federal level, since 2018 the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 requests for further land use change in the area. If approved, 650 more hectares of jungle will disappear.

Data obtained through freedom of information shows what urban development projects have been processed over this period, these ranging from 2,247 tiny, popular housing units on the one hand to a 20-story, 429-room all-inclusive luxury hotel. Crucially, none of these include applications for public parks or green areas to be developed or improved, in a city that is already bursting at the seams, having exceeded its tourist carrying capacity for more than a decade.

This shows how unsustainable urban development and social inequality can go hand-in-hand, says McCoy. For the wealthy, jungle is being removed to build luxury complexes adorned with grass; in the south of the city, new developments come complete with gardens, and residents enjoy 9.3 square meters of green space per person, very close to what the World Health Organization marks as optimal. But in the north of the city, where the social housing complexes are located (what are essentially dormitory zones for workers in the tourism industry), residents have only 2.3 square meters of green space per person.

“It is unfair,” says McCoy, because that wealthier zone is home to only 35,000 people—4 percent of the population, and typically those with the highest incomes. Whereas that second, space-deprived zone, where Pérez lives, is home to 500,000 people—50 percent of the population, among them the most marginalized, who have to make do with spaces with little dignity, like this park.

This space that Pérez and I are sitting in has barely the footprint of a medium-size house and is the only green space in the 10 surrounding neighborhoods. It is, in fact, a tiny urban cenote —a water-filled sinkhole (these are relatively common geographical features that characterize the Yucatan landscape). Since no tourists come here, it is full of garbage, its water green and thick and fenced off so that no one would think of entering. Around it there are three swings, two slides, two see-saws, and half a basketball court.

“It is very cramped,” Pérez says of the park. “I would like there to be more and for each park to have different games. That way each person could choose which one to go to, because all the parks are the same, with the same games, and the children get bored.” Pérez arrived at the park accompanied by Guadalupe Sánchez, an older woman who counts Pérez as her only friend.

Hence the importance of public spaces, says McCoy. “They are generators of social cohesion, where people meet and recognize each other, creating identity. They help to densify the social fabric, contributing to improve security, especially for vulnerable groups, such as women, the elderly, and children.”

Green spaces and public parks also help to improve the perception of security and, when they are in good condition, to inhibit crime, says Zury Rodríguez Trinidad, director of Crime Prevention of the Secretariat of Security of Cancún. A public space full of people encourages interaction among neighbors. There are more eyes watching what is happening around the neighborhood, and people have the opportunity to be distracted, rest, or exercise in a place intended for that purpose.

Within his department, he says, there is a team in charge of mowing neglected green areas, because he knows that a vacant lot represents a risk, especially for women, who could be assaulted or raped there. Cancún has one of the highest rates of sex crimes Mexico—there were 17.9 investigations per 100,000 inhabitants in the first half of 2024, more than double the national average of 8.2, according to the Secretariat of Citizen Security of the state of Quintana Roo, where the city is located.

In the first half of the year, Cancún registered 21 neighborhoods with a high or very high incidence of crime, 19 of which are located in the northern zone where green spaces or public parks are scarce, and where overdensification and overcrowding is an issue.

“Believe it or not it used to be worse; before there were much more assaults or bodies left lying around, but since it’s been lit up, nothing like that has happened here,” says city resident Miguel Ávila, referring to efforts made by Mexico’s Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development to try to fix Cancún’s public space problem. In 2021, more than 90 million pesos ($45 million) were invested in the construction of two public markets, a community development center, two parks and the renovation of two more, including the Parque de los Gemelos, where I spoke with Ávila.

Before there were two smaller open spaces here, divided by a street, Ávila explains. “We called them ‘the twins.’ Then they joined them and made this new park.” Now there are two soccer fields with artificial grass, two basketball courts, a space with children’s games, a wide covered walkway where boxing is practiced, and lots of lighting. More than 150 people are training, exercising, or simply resting on a bench the night I visit.

Ávila’s two daughters, both in high school, come daily to practice basketball and are part of the “Alab óol” club (“The Last Breath” in Mayan). Everyone, at the request of coach Alexis Zepeda, gets involved with the maintenance of the park, sweeping, cleaning, taking care of each other, and no one has ever witnessed an assault or seen a body dumped. Most of the team lives locally, but there are also people who travel an hour to get here—because where they live there are no public courts.