Cancun: A Luxury Resort Engulfed in Tourist Attributes
by Habeeb Salloum

Recommended for couples looking for beach honeymoons, getaways

“We have the most perfect resort in the world. It's the only spot on earth which was picked by computer for development as a tourist centre.” Our Cancún guide Manual glowed with pride, then continued with a bit of information that he must have passed on to thousands of other tourists: “You know that when Mexico in 1960 was searching for a spot to build a new resort, data on all possible sites were fed into a computer and it was discovered that Cancún was the perfect location - a place where many honeymooners travel to spend their days of bliss.”

Obviously, Manual had a point. The ensuing years were to confirm that the computer had made an exemplary decision. In a few decades, after work began in the early 1970s, Cancún, located in the state of Quintana Roo, became Mexico's most famous holiday mecca. Today, it is Mexico’s most glamorous Caribbean resort which lures annually some 1,500,000 visitors, including a fair number of newly-weds. It has become, as it was in the days of the Mayan kings, a playground for the lovers and affluent.

Situated in the heart of the Maya world, Cancún, or ‘Golden Snake’ in the Mayan dialect, offers luxury accommodation and very modern tourist facilities, a gentle climate, averaging about 27 C (80 F), and magnificent blue water lapping cool talcum-white sand. There are very few other places in the world where sky, sea and sand blend together so perfectly.

Its many natural and modern tourist attributes, along with the nearby vast world of breathtaking Mayan ruins, make it a perfect holiday destination. Here, a honeymooner or any traveller can savour the best of what the 21st century has to offer and, if inclined, visit unspoiled nature and the ruins of the ultimate civilization developed in pre-Columbus America.

The resort is divided into two sections: Cancún City, - a boom town appearing to have been erected overnight; and the elegant hotel-studded island - the luxurious section called Zona Hotelera, once an uninhabited sandbar edging the verdant Yucatán jungle. Today, the well-paved Kukulkán Boulevard connects the 22 km (14 mi) long and near 1/2 km wide elbow-shaped island from end to end. The Zona is covered with more than 120 fine hotels, many all-inclusive, and condos with 26,000 rooms. All the hotels are beautifully designed and set in lavish layouts. With the sea on one side and the jungle-backed lagoon on the other, every one of their rooms looks out onto the water.

In between, sumptuous restaurants, ultra modern shopping plazas and the largest Convention Centre in the Caribbean, crowd the Zona. Oozing in luxury, these striking structures with their atriums, pyramids, towers and turrets appear to be more at home in the Arabian Nights. They are edged by the delightful Cancún beaches with their finely-grained delicate white sands, always cool to the touch. Seeing me enjoying the sand's fine texture, a passing lifeguard warned me “Beware! The white sands act as a natural reflector. You can easily sunburn.”

A tourist must take care when lazing on the beaches - some kind of sun protection is essential. Also, the riptides and undertow are dangerous and unless one is a strong swimmer, the pool is the place to idle away the time. Another major drawback to Cancún’s beaches are their location in the Caribbean hurricane zone. It is not the best place to be during a major storm. In l988, the fierce Hurricane Gilbert took away most of the sands from a number of beaches.

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