Cancun’s Shrinking Beaches

Mexico spent $19 million to replace beaches washed away by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, but erosion has shrunk Cancun’s sandy playground to the point where waves at high tide lap against some hotel patios.

To bring tourists pouring back after Hurricane Wilma, the ocean floor was dredged to rebuild eight miles of beach, nearly double their pre-hurricane size, and hotels were refurbished.

Just a year after the grand refurbishment was completed, the beaches have shrunk again, from 100 feet to less than 70 feet at mid-tide in the tourist zone, and swimmers are forced to clamber down 3-foot drops in the sand level to reach the water.

Most sections of beach remain about as wide as before the hurricane hit, although some are less –barely 30 feet wide- and the sea is relentlessly munching away at what’s left, said biologist Alfredo Arellano, Yucatan director for the government’s Commission for Natural Protected Areas.

Officials, developers and investors foresaw erosion and are preparing for a long-term response. They plan a public-private fund for future beach restorations, and an artificial reef to help contain the sand. Meanwhile, sandbags line some beaches and large, cloth-like tubes have been installed offshore.

But environmentalists see no point as long as hotels continue building at the water’s edge and ripping out vegetation whose roots once helped to hold the sand in place. They are lobbying for a belt of native plants and walking paths, to separate hotels from beaches, even in places already developed.

The Cancun Convention & Visitors Bureau says beaches typically erode in winter, when wind and currents are strongest, and that the shore returns to normal the rest of the year. Environmentalists, however, say erosion has worsened ever since the 1970s, when the Mexican government began converting the long sandbar with coconut farms into the nation’s top resort.