Cancun: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Cancún is not an old place that became a resort. In 1968 the Bank of Mexico ran a study to find the single best site on the Caribbean coast for a resort built from nothing, scoring beach quality, water clarity, hurricane risk and flight time from the United States, and this island won. When construction began on the twenty-third of January 1970 there were exactly three people living on it, the caretakers of a coconut plantation, and a hundred and seventeen in the fishing village next door. The population now is about a million. This walk is the city those workers built, which is a separate city from the one on the beach.

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A short history of Cancun

This strip of sand had the remains of small Maya settlements, and until the 1960s only a few dozen fishermen lived here. In 1970 the Mexican government chose the site, after a survey that looked for a suitable coast on which to build a tourist city from scratch, and construction began. The first hotels opened in 1974. In 1988 Hurricane Gilbert struck the city, and in 2005 Hurricane Wilma, and both destroyed parts of the hotel zone. Today Cancún is one of the largest tourist destinations in Latin America.

The ten best sights in Cancun

1
Zona Arqueológica El Rey
Forty-seven Maya structures inside the hotel zone, from about 1200; an iguana colony lives in it
2
Museo Maya de Cancún
Opened 2012 and raised on piles against flooding; the San Miguelito site is in the grounds and included
3
El Meco
A larger site north of the city with a fifteen-metre pyramid; almost nobody goes and it is cheap
4
Zona Arqueológica de Tulum
The only major Maya city built on the sea; it was still inhabited when the Spanish first saw it in 1518
5
Zona Arqueológica de Cobá
Nohoch Mul is forty-two metres, the tallest pyramid in the Yucatán; the site is reached by bicycle
6
Ek Balam
The stucco frieze on the Acropolis is the best-preserved Maya stucco anywhere, and you climb to it
7
Muyil
A small site on the edge of Sian Ka’an with a seventeen-metre pyramid and a path to a lagoon
8
Valladolid
Founded 1543 on a Maya town; the Caste War, a Maya uprising that held the peninsula for decades, began near here
9
Museo Subacuático de Arte
Over five hundred sculptures sunk offshore from 2009, specifically to take divers off the living reef
10
Casa de la Cultura
In the centre and used by the city rather than by visitors; free concerts and a Maya language school

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Cancun →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Cancun:

Free walking tours in Cancun

The city a computer chose

Parque Las Palapas · This square is the centre of the planned city, and the plan is the thing: the downtown was laid out in numbered superblocks, the supermanzanas, each intended to hold its own school, market and clinic within walking distance, with the main roads running between them rather than through them. Nobody here uses street names — an address is a supermanzana number, a block and a lot, and taxi drivers navigate by those.
Mercado 23 · This is the market the city shops at, and it was one of the first things built — the workers arriving from Yucatán, Veracruz and Chiapas in 1970 needed somewhere to buy food before there was a single hotel. It is produce, butchers and lunch counters, prices are in pesos, there is nothing for visitors to buy, and that is exactly why it is on this route.
Mercado 28 · The craft market, and the economics are worth knowing before you haggle: almost nothing sold here is made in Quintana Roo. The textiles come from Chiapas and Oaxaca, the silver from Taxco, the hammocks from Yucatán — the state has no craft tradition of its own because it had almost no population until 1970. The food courts at the back serve the stallholders and are the cheapest proper meal in the city.
Avenida Yaxchilán · The eating and drinking street of the real city, and the names on this route explain the plan: every main avenue in Cancún is named after a Maya archaeological site — Tulum, Cobá, Uxmal, Bonampak, Yaxchilán, Chichén Itzá. The planners in 1970 had a new city with no history, so they borrowed the region’s, and the street grid is in effect a map of the Maya world.
Avenida Tulum · The spine of the downtown, and the dividing line in practice: the hotel zone has its own bus, its own prices in dollars and its own police, and most of the people who work there live on this side and commute by the R1 for about a dollar. Roughly a third of the city’s workforce is in tourism directly. The colectivo vans south to Playa del Carmen and Tulum leave from beside this avenue.
Parque Kabah · A strip of actual jungle left inside the city, with spider monkeys, coatis and iguanas in it, and it is the one place in Cancún where you can see what the whole site looked like in 1969 — low dry forest on limestone with no surface water at all. It is free, it has a running track and it is used almost entirely by residents.

Twenty-two kilometres of sandbar

The hotel zone is a barrier island twenty-two kilometres long and in places two hundred metres wide, bent into a shape like a seven, with the Caribbean on one side and a lagoon on the other. Everything on it was built after 1974. Two things to understand before you choose a beach: the north-facing stretch is calm and shallow because it sits inside the island’s bend, and the east-facing stretch has real surf and an undertow. And the beaches are public by Mexican law all the way to the high water line, whatever a hotel implies.

Playa Tortugas · This is the calm end, on the stretch facing north into the sheltered bay, and the water is waist-deep for a long way out. It is also the only major beach with a public ferry dock on it, which is why the boats to Isla Mujeres leave from here, and why the beach is busy from nine with people waiting for them rather than swimming.
Punta Cancún · The bend in the seven, and the engineering is visible here: the beach on the east side of this point was completely stripped by Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, which sat over the city for nearly three days. The sand that is there now was dredged from the sea floor and pumped ashore, and it has had to be replaced again since. Nothing on this island is the beach that the computer model scored in 1968.
Playa Marlín · On the east-facing side with real waves, and this is where the sargassum question matters. Since 2011 the Caribbean coast has had huge seasonal influxes of sargassum seaweed, worst roughly between April and August, and the state now runs barriers and raking crews. The lagoon side and the north-facing beaches get almost none of it, which is the practical answer if you are here in the season.
Zona Arqueológica El Rey · Forty-seven Maya structures on the lagoon side, occupied from about twelve hundred until the Spanish arrived, and they are in the middle of the hotel zone because the planners in 1970 chose to build around them rather than clear them. The site is also a managed iguana colony — several hundred of them — and they are the main reason most visitors remember it.
Playa Delfines · The only large beach in the hotel zone with no hotel behind it, because the land is on a bluff and a hotel was never built on it — which is why it is the one place you can see the whole twenty-two kilometres at once and the colour of the water properly. The CANCÚN letters are here and the beach has a lifeguard and no beach club.
Punta Nizuc and the underwater museum · At the southern tip the Mesoamerican reef comes closest to the shore, and offshore from here there are more than five hundred concrete sculptures on the sea floor. They were sunk between 2009 and 2013 for a specific reason: the reef off Cancún was being damaged by around seven hundred and fifty thousand divers and snorkellers a year, and the museum was built to take some of them somewhere else while acting as a surface for new coral.

The peninsula with no rivers

There is not one river on the whole Yucatán peninsula, and that single fact explains everything built here. The rock is porous limestone, so all the rain goes straight down, and all the fresh water is in a flooded cave system underground; where a cave roof has collapsed you get a cenote, and a cenote was the only water supply there was. Every Maya city on this peninsula is sited on one. And the reason the cenotes lie where they do is an asteroid: the Chicxulub impact of sixty-six million years ago hit just off the north-west coast, and a ring of cenotes traces the rim of its crater.

Puerto Morelos · Thirty-six kilometres south, and the reef here is six hundred metres from the beach — the closest approach anywhere on this coast, which is why the national park was declared in 1998 and why the snorkelling is from a small boat rather than a cruise. The lighthouse at the end of the beach leans visibly: Hurricane Beulah bent it in 1967 and the town left it standing as it is.
Cenote Dos Ojos · In January 2018 divers found a connection between this cave system and Sac Actun next door, and the merged system became the longest known underwater cave in the world at about three hundred and seventy kilometres. Mapping it has taken decades of cave diving and it is still not finished. There are also human and megafauna bones in parts of it from when the caves were dry, over ten thousand years ago.
Casa Cenote · An open mangrove channel where the underground river reaches the sea, and it demonstrates the hydrology better than any cave: fresh water flows out on top and sea water pushes in underneath, and the boundary between them is visible as a shimmering layer you can swim through. It is called a halocline and the two layers are different temperatures.
Zona Arqueológica de Tulum · The only major Maya city built directly on the sea, walled on three sides and the cliff on the fourth, and occupied late — from about twelve hundred until well after the Spanish arrived. In 1518 Juan de Grijalva’s expedition sailed past it and the account describes a city as large as Seville with a tower. It was a trading port, and the gap in the cliff below the main temple is a landing place for canoes.
Zona Arqueológica de Cobá · Cobá was a road hub. More than fifty raised stone causeways, sacbeob, radiate from it, and one of them runs a hundred kilometres west to Yaxuná — the longest Maya road known, built level across swamp and forest with no wheel to use it. The main pyramid, Nohoch Mul, is forty-two metres and the tallest in the Yucatán, and the site is so large that you hire a bicycle to cross it.
Valladolid · A colonial town founded in 1543 on top of a Maya settlement, with a cenote inside the town itself, and the history here is the one the coast does not tell. In 1847 the Caste War began a few kilometres from this square: a Maya uprising against the Yucatecan landowners that at its height controlled most of the peninsula, ran its own state for decades around a talking cross, and was not declared over by Mexico until 1901.

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Getting to Cancun and getting around

Cancún International Airport · The second busiest airport in Mexico; the ADO bus to downtown is a fraction of the taxi fare
ADO bus terminal · In the centre; Tulum in two hours, Mérida in four, and the long-distance coaches are genuinely good
Puerto Juárez ferry · The crossing to Isla Mujeres takes twenty minutes; this is the local terminal and the cheaper one
The R1 bus, Boulevard Kukulcán · Runs the whole twenty-two kilometres of the hotel zone day and night for about a dollar
Avenida Tulum · The main road of the real city; the colectivos south along the coast leave from beside it
Punta Sam · The car ferry to Isla Mujeres, north of Puerto Juárez; slower and it takes vehicles

Cheap eats in Cancun

Yucatán cooking is the most distinct regional cuisine in Mexico and it is barely Mexican: the peninsula was cut off from the rest of the country by jungle until the 1960s and traded by sea with Cuba, New Orleans and Europe instead, so the food took in Lebanese, Dutch and Caribbean things that never reached Mexico City. It uses achiote, sour orange, habanero and pit cooking rather than the central Mexican repertoire. The rule for finding it is simple: nothing in the hotel zone, everything downtown, and the best of it is in a lunch place that closes at four. Three to eight dollars a plate.

Cochinita pibil · Pork in achiote and sour orange cooked underground overnight; a taco is under a dollar and it is a morning dish
Panuchos and salbutes · Two fried tortillas that look identical; one has beans inside the dough and one does not, and that is the whole difference
Sopa de lima · Chicken broth with shredded turkey, tortilla strips and a local lime that is not a lime
Marquesitas · A crisp rolled crepe filled with Nutella and grated Edam; the Dutch cheese is the point and it is not a mistake
Habanero and xnipec · The habanero comes from here; xnipec is the raw salsa of it, and the name means dog’s nose
Relleno negro · Turkey in a black recado of burnt chillies; the chillies are charred until they are actually carbonised
Papadzules · Tortillas rolled round egg in a pumpkin seed sauce; entirely pre-Hispanic and the oldest dish here
Xtabentún · An anise and honey liqueur made from the nectar of a specific morning glory the Maya used ritually
Mercado 23 lunch counters · Four or five loncherías inside the market; a full comida corrida for about four dollars and no English
Ceviche and aguachile · At Puerto Juárez the fishing boats land beside the ferry dock; the stalls there buy from them directly

Museums in Cancun

Cancún has almost nothing old because it is fifty-five years old, so the museums here are either about the Maya or about the reef, and the serious ones are mostly outside the city. The one real museum in Cancún is the Maya museum, which was built in 2012 to hold the regional collection and is raised on piles because the site floods. Everything else worth a day — Tulum, Cobá, Ek Balam, the Valladolid cenotes — is between a hundred and a hundred and sixty kilometres away and is a bus or a hire car.

Museo Maya de Cancún · Opened 2012 and raised on piles; the San Miguelito site in the grounds is included in the ticket
Museo Subacuático de Arte · Over five hundred sculptures on the sea floor, sunk from 2009 as an artificial reef and a diversion
Zona Arqueológica de Tulum · Go at eight when it opens; by ten it is the most visited site in Quintana Roo and the heat is severe
Zona Arqueológica de Cobá · Fifty raised stone roads radiate from it, one running a hundred kilometres west; hire a bicycle inside
Ek Balam · The Acropolis frieze is the best-preserved Maya stucco anywhere and you can climb up to it
Muyil · A small site on the edge of Sian Ka’an; a path from it leads to a lagoon you can float down
El Meco · Fifteen minutes from downtown with a climbable pyramid; a few dollars and almost no visitors
Zona Arqueológica El Rey · Inside the hotel zone; forty-seven structures, several hundred iguanas, and it takes half an hour

Holy places in Cancun

There is no colonial church in Cancún because there was no Cancún, and the religious and historical weight of this region is all inland and all Maya. Two things are worth going for. The first is the cenote, which was not a swimming pool but a doorway: the Maya treated them as entrances to the underworld and made offerings in them, and the archaeology from the bottoms of them is the main source for how that worked. The second is the Caste War, a Maya uprising that ran its own state on this peninsula for over fifty years and which the coast does not mention.

Punta Sur, Isla Mujeres · A shrine to Ixchel stood here; the island is named for the female figures the Spanish found in it in 1517
Gran Cenote · A cenote was not a swimming hole; the Maya treated them as entrances to the underworld and made offerings
Valladolid and the Caste War · A Maya uprising began near here in 1847 and Mexico did not declare it over until 1901
Cenote Suytun · The shaft of light through the roof lands on the platform around midday and only in some months
Punta Laguna · A reserve run by the Maya community that owns it; the guides perform a blessing before you enter the forest
Zona Arqueológica de Tulum · The Temple of the Descending God and the wall; the city was a port and a shrine at the same time
Muyil and the Sian Ka’an canals · The Maya cut a canal from this site through the mangrove to the lagoon; it is still there and you float it
Las Coloradas · The Maya worked salt on this coast and traded it inland; the ponds are still a commercial salt works

Nature and day trips near Cancun

The two natural facts about this coast are both consequences of limestone. There is no surface water anywhere on the peninsula, so everything fresh is in a flooded cave system and the cenotes are the holes in its roof; and the reef offshore is the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second longest in the world at about a thousand kilometres from here to Honduras. Both are under pressure — the reef from visitor numbers and bleaching, the caves from the sewage of a coast that grew from nothing in fifty years. Hurricane season is June to November and peaks in September.

The cenotes and Chicxulub · There are an estimated six to ten thousand cenotes, and a ring of them traces an asteroid crater
Cenote Dos Ojos and Sac Actun · Connected in 2018 into the longest known underwater cave system in the world, about 370 kilometres
Puerto Morelos reef · The reef is six hundred metres offshore here; a national park since 1998 and the boats are licensed
Isla Contoy · Two hundred visitors a day maximum; one hundred and fifty bird species nest on it and most of the island is closed
Río Lagartos · Thousands of flamingos in a biosphere reserve; the boat is from the village and the guides are fishermen
Punta Laguna · Spider monkeys in a community reserve; the Maya village that owns the land manages the visits
Sian Ka’an · Five thousand square kilometres of reserve; the track in is fifty kilometres of potholes and that is the filter
Isla Holbox · No cars; whale sharks gather off it from June to September and the tours are quota-limited

Things to do in Cancun with kids

This is one of the easiest places in the world with children, and the reason is the geography: the north-facing beaches inside the island’s bend are waist-deep for fifty metres with no waves at all, the sea is twenty-eight degrees most of the year, and the hotel zone is a single bus route. The two things to plan around are heat and sun — the UV here is extreme between eleven and four and shade on a beach is rare — and the sargassum season from roughly April to August, which the lagoon-side and north-facing beaches largely escape.

Playa Tortugas · Shallow, calm, north-facing and with a public dock; the obvious first beach with small children
Playa Norte, Isla Mujeres · Waist-deep for fifty metres and no waves; a twenty-minute ferry and worth the day
Museo Maya de Cancún · Air conditioned, under an hour, and the archaeological site in the grounds is included in the ticket
Zona Arqueológica El Rey · Several hundred iguanas living among Maya ruins; half an hour, cheap, and children remember the iguanas
Parque Kabah · Free jungle paths with spider monkeys and coatis in the middle of the city; shaded and quiet
Xcaret · Expensive and enormous; the underground river swim and the evening show are what it is for
Xel-Há · A natural inlet rather than a built park; all-inclusive, calm water and easier with young children
Akumal turtles · Green turtles graze the seagrass in the bay; a guide and a life jacket are compulsory and rightly so

Nightlife in Cancun

Cancún has two nights and they do not meet. The hotel zone has the big clubs built for spring break and for tour packages — they work on an open-bar entry price rather than a bar tab, they are enormous, and the shows are variety acts rather than DJs. Downtown is where the city goes, in Spanish and in pesos, around Avenida Yaxchilán and Parque Las Palapas, and it is a fraction of the price. The bus between the two runs all night for about a dollar, which makes the choice easy.

Parque Las Palapas · Food stalls and a bandstand until midnight; families, marquesitas and prices in pesos
Avenida Yaxchilán · The downtown bar and cantina strip; live música norteña most nights and no cover charge
Coco Bongo · Not a nightclub but a variety show with acrobats and impersonators; one price, open bar, and it is relentless
Mandala and the Punta Cancún strip · Four large clubs in two hundred metres at the bend of the island; the queue is the business model
Puerto Cancún marina · Restaurants and bars on the water between the centre and the hotel zone; residents rather than packages
Quinta Avenida, Playa del Carmen · Sixty-eight kilometres south and a different night entirely; smaller rooms and the music is better

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Frequently asked questions about Cancun

What is there to see in Cancun?

The top sights in Cancun are Zona Arqueológica El Rey, Museo Maya de Cancún and El Meco. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Cancun?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Cancun without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Cancun?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Cancun, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city a computer chose.

How do you get to Cancun and get around?

The main ways are Cancún International Airport, ADO bus terminal and Puerto Juárez ferry. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Cancun, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Cancun that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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