ecodisaster but make it ecochic
once the jungle is razed, will Tulum be good enough for the insta grid?
For our first international vacation as a couple, I thought we were going someplace reminiscent of the Azores Islands – remote, rugged, natural, untouched – but instead Caio and I found ourselves in a town designed to be the perfect backdrop for the Insta grid. On the travel blogs I read, Tulum, known for its pristine water and lush jungle, was advertised to me as a bohemian beach town that drew in a more conscious tourist than the ones who’d be happier in Cancun’s giant resorts.
The “bohemian” description should have tipped me off, because what we saw was a Tulum built up to match the ferocity with which tourists want to be photographed in an expensive, untouched-yet-tamed jungle setting, to stay in hotels that boast an “eco-chic” aesthetic yet bear none of the practices of environmental sustainability, and to be conspicuous about their spending while turning a blind eye to the poverty around them.
We have an entire industry in Tulum simulating the aesthetics of a jungle while killing the jungle and selling the promise of spiritual healing so long as you’re willing to fork out the cash in exchange for spirituality.
To give you an idea of Tulum, you should know this first: the ancient clifftop city was built by the Mayans around 1200 CE. Tulum was a walled fortress facing the sea. The modern city is built to the west of the ancient Mayan city of Tulum, now a fascinating archaeological site open for tourist exploration.
Tulum is in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. This is where the Chicxulub asteroid made impact with the earth. This is where the dinosaurs lived and died. This is where our world as we know it slowly emerged once the dust settled. Below the surface, ten thousand cenotes, or water-filled caverns, form an intricate underground waterway. These cenotes were the Mayans’ main source of fresh water, the site of some of their ritual human sacrifices, and a sacred entrance to the underworld.
Dwellers of ancient Tulum were dedicated to the planet Venus, predicting and following the celestial body’s appearance in the sky. Following the astral theme, the majority of the streets in Tulum Centro (modern Tulum’s town center) are named after the stars: Neputuno, Venus, Osiris, Andromeda, Oríon, Satélite, Gemini, Asteroide. Following street directions never felt so romantic as it did here.
For us, this wasn’t a trip about staying at the chicest ocean-side hotels in the Zona Hotelera, attending full-moon jungle parties, or dining at the finest restaurants owned by American chefs. We had a stricter budget than most people who come to Tulum and made the decision to save our money for what seemed most worth it: a room in Tulum Centro away from anyone dressed like they were at Coachella, a rented car, great local food, and daily trips to cenotes and geological sites.
Once we’d figured out the eating situation in Centro — which is to say, we learned that it was not worth it to spend money on mid-tier food, all of which catered to foreigners in both taste and price tag, but that it was better off to eat only where the locals ate — we settled into a daily routine that allowed the vacation to be restful despite daily adventures.
Our days went like this: we’d have a late dinner in a restaurant deep in the cosmos-named roads of Centro. Dinner was followed with ice cream from Panne e Cioccolato, the ice cream shop’s air conditioning providing a reprieve from the heat before our leisurely walk back home. On Avenida Tulum’s broad pedestrian sidewalk — wide enough for a separated bike lane — late each night, we walked with the locals. Every now and then, a truck passed with a machine gun mounted in the back of the flatbed, manned by three men. The men were sometimes part of the police force, sometimes military, other times national guard.
On the streets, we passed a recreational soccer game with locals cheering while indulging in late night street food from cart vendors. The city was alive at night, when the summer heat finally abated. A friendly pregnant dog vied for the attention of passersby, and I befriended another dog that belonged to the neighbors next to our apartment building.
In the mornings, I insisted on avocado toast from (possibly) the only air conditioned cafe in town. Before heading out for the day, I’d buy a ripe mango or two from the fruit seller on our street. We’d drive off to a cenote for the afternoon and head home where I’d indulge in my perfect mango. We’d watch the sunset from the building’s small rooftop pool and plan our night, shower, and head out to dinner. Everyday at least one mind-blowing meal, everyday a different cenote. And so it went for a week.
In the cenotes, there is magic. I’m not one that finds it easy to relax without worrying about what I could be doing in the meantime, but in these freshwater pools, I just floated. Being in these ancient, cool caverns formed 66 million years ago allowed me to contend with the timelessness of time, of my own insignificance on the planet in that way I can only feel when looking at mountains. I stared at the way the sun dappled-water refracted against the limestone walls. Or I floated on my back and focused on the sunshine coming through the thicket of tree roots above, along the edge of the cenote’s ceiling. I did this for hours. And I wanted for nothing.
One thing was missing, and that thing was a fish. One excellent fish dish, something I’d been dreaming of having on this trip. I searched every single restaurant in town. We weren’t flush with cash, so the choice felt critical. Pay a moderate amount, and we might end up wasting money on a mediocre fish. Pick the wrong touristy restaurant, one of the ones that refuses to post menu prices online, and we might end up disappointed by our own high expectations and footing a bill neither of us was prepared for.
But then I found it: Hartwell. It was beyond budget, but there was no doubt this place was excellent. Everything they served was grilled over a wood fire. They had no paper menu, only a chalkboard, updated daily, for reference. It was the one.
Hartwell is in Tulum’s Zona Hotelera, the neighborhood along the beach road full of pricy hotels and high end restaurants, which up until then we’d had no reason to venture to. Caio wasn’t interested in being in the most touristic part of town, but I insisted. I wanted a night “out.” And by that I meant a night “out there. Where the pretty people go.” I wanted to see what the fuss of Tulum was about.
We drove down the single road that led to the Zona Hotelera and proceeded to have the best seafood of my life. Everything was perfect: the charred beet with avocado sauce defied expectations for beets; the yucca puree was crispy and satisfied the itch for carbs; the octopus, a whole one, the best I’ve ever had; and the crown of the meal, a whole fish!, charred and dressed with a papaya salad on top.
Once the fish’s flesh was gone, I started poking at the collars for meat, and then the head, until Caio and I left nothing but loose bones on the plate. The server that cleared our table took a minute to figure out what we’d eaten, surreptitiously told us that he couldn’t believe how the other patrons never bother with the head, and confided in us that it’s his favorite part of the fish, too.
On the walk back to the car, I struggled with my platform sandals on the uneven, single-file sidewalk. We heard a whisper from a young man in an alleyway directed at us, marijuana? cocaine?
The road was oddly quiet. This was the touristic heart of Tulum, but no one was here. Hostesses looked forlornly at the passersby while their restaurants sat empty behind them. It was July, after all, the off-season. Tulum in the summer no longer serves as a haven of fine weather that provides the perfect escape for winter-weary dwellers of the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, in July, Tulum is a dizzyingly hot jungle with a mosquito population to match, and a sargassum problem marring the otherwise picturesque beaches.
I stepped into a jarringly air conditioned pharmacy to buy a bottle of water and, as I pulled out my card to pay, noticed an oddity in my periphery. It was a pamphlet offering literally every single prescription drug I could think of, for exceptionally low prices, over the counter.
The pharmacist, clearly a saleswoman, noticed my gaze and pulled out a binder full of even more medicine: generic formulations of brand name medication to treat everything from depression to anxiety to inattention to weight gain and impotence. Basically, everything you’d need to treat to not be a drag at a beach party.
Caio wanted to never return.
But two days later we found ourselves in the Zona Hotelera again, this time during the daytime, hoping to find a beach club cheap enough to be worth lounging there for the day. This was Caio’s vacation desire, to have a day of doing nothing by the ocean. Mine was the fish.
Being in the Zona Hotelera in the daytime felt like being on an influencer’s Instagram grid: crystal clear blue water, swaying lush tropical fauna, rattan furniture everywhere, glittering high end restaurants and eco-chic hotels lining each side of the road. In the Zona Hotelera, one could forget they were in Mexico at all.
I don’t mean that derogatorily towards Mexico. I mean, the Zona Hotelera neighborhood eliminated all traces of being in Mexico.
Along this ten kilometer (6 mile) strip, there was no trace of Mexican food in the dozens of high end restaurants, no Mexican souvenirs or postcards in the pharmacies, no Mexican garments in the boutique clothing shops selling glitzy, golden, mesh $200 beach cover-ups. You couldn’t even see the famed coastline thanks to the hotels lining the water-facing side of the road. Access to the beach was possible if you went into a private beach club and paid four times’ local Mexicans’ daily wages to sit and gaze at the ocean.
We found the cheapest beach club and agreed to spend the $30 apiece, knowing we could recoup it by buying drinks and food directly from the club’s restaurant. Five minutes after entering, we were walking back out towards the car again. The sargassum problem was so bad that neither of us could swim in the water without getting tangled up in dry, prickly seaweed.
This is where the story shifts beyond the picture-perfect grid-worthy snapshot of Tulum. If you tilt the camera, just slightly, you start to see a different picture entirely.
To give you an idea of Tulum, you should know this first: Tulum, in the 90s, was a small fishing village of 2000 Indigenous residents. The town did not yet have a tourism industry but it drew the free-spirited travelers, ones who were willing to rough it for a chance to sleep under the stars in paradise. They would machete their way through the thicket of jungle and camp on the beach or stay in rustic shacks without functioning water or electricity. It wasn’t “jungle vibes” back then, a word I kept seeing over and over again used by travel bloggers. Back then, it was literally just jungle.
But then, as it always happens, came the opportunity to cash in. And so came the hotels, and the the developers, and the foreign investment money. The jungle was razed to make room for vacation homes to sell to foreigners. And now, two million visitors cram into Tulum — a town originally built with the infrastructure to support a population of 7,000 — each year, mostly between December to April, in order to experience “healing” in “eco-chic” hotels that have fully privatized and blocked the view of the entire coastline.
[Tulum’s] construction did, however, displace the long-standing Maya communities that were already there. The disruption forced Mayas to abandon agricultural production and adopt wage labor as a matter of economic survival. Tulum’s “ejido” system, in which land tenure is communally held and village-based, facilitated the waves of gentrification and dispossession.
[…] Ejidos were government land grants given to communities who would then collectively maintain the land, without owning it. This land distribution process also entailed promoting non-indigenous settlement on indigenous lands. […] In Tulum, Mayas, who before the “ejido” had de facto ownership and control of the territory, suddenly found that the state now owned and regulated access to the land, and could give “ejido” titles to Mexican and Yucatec developers who sought to take advantage of the program.
It doesn’t take a city planner to see that the Zona Hotelera was built quickly without a plan in mind. The two-lane road and single-file sidewalks are often congested with tourists and car traffic is made worse by cyclists who are forced to share the road with vehicles.
Worse, the neighborhood has no infrastructure to speak of. Since Tulum’s electric grid exists mainly in Centro and doesn’t extend into the Zona Hotelera, the eco-chic hotels along the water run on diesel generators that must keep burning fuel to power all-day air conditioning and electricity for the tourists looking to be pampered. On top of that, only about 20% of Tulum is properly hooked up to sewage pipes while the rest of the city relies on septic tanks, leading to partially-treated human waste regularly seeping into the ocean and groundwater, right into the sacred cenotes I mentioned earlier, 80% of which are contaminated.
To get to a mezcaleria a mile from our accommodations in Tulum Centro, Caio and I walked down a dirt road of one story houses that looked like they didn’t have access to electricity or plumbing. The street culminated with a three story luxury development, all white walls and modern large black-framed windows, trees peeking over a six foot white concrete wall, with a hefty security door at the front. A quick price check online told me that a 2bed 2bath here goes for $360,000-$420,000 USD. This while the minimum wage in Mexico is $10 USD per day.1 This luxury home marked the threshold of the Aldea Zama neighborhood.
Aldea Zama, a new, planned development to the west of the city center, looms eerily empty and brand new, with picturesque modern houses reminiscent of an American suburb. Like an American suburb, the neighborhood’s architecture sends a clear message of who is and isn’t welcome on Aldea Zama’s dignified streets.
We found our mezcaleria in a commercial/residential complex that had a pedestrian experience that weirdly reminded me of The Grove in LA, except desolate and without the brand name shops — yet. We were the only people at the Mamazul Mezcaleria, which made being drunk after a mezcal “tasting” more awkward than it needed to be. Because of our inebriated state and the dirt roads and the deserted streets, I wanted us to get a cab home. In Centro, there were locals all around us that made the streets feel safe. In desolate Aldea Zama, there was no one to help if something went wrong.
Contrasted with the lively feeling of Centro, it seemed like Aldea Zama was completely empty for the off season. It occurred to me that the people who winter in Tulum, the owners of these houses and condos, were possibly summering elsewhere, somewhere more temperate than the hot jungle.
The highways leading out of Tulum boast English billboards advertising the city of the future and enticing me to make Mexico your second home.2 Beyond the billboards sat empty tracts of land where the jungle used to be. These were the new housing developments. Most of these developments have just a single, one story modern building, the sales office, where you can talk to someone about purchasing property here.
To be clear, you can’t outright buy a house at most of these developments, but you can instead “pre-purchase” a vacation home to be built at a later date. I visited the website of one developer, Los Amigos, to view their “pre-sale” developments. The site urges me heavily to “invest now” in their newest development, 101 Park. But I keep wondering what I’d be investing in.
Tulum drew the world’s tourists for its natural beauty, the untouched jungle, pristine water cenotes, white sand beaches, and a promise of ancient spirituality, purportedly made accessible to new age practitioners. But in developing Tulum, the jungle is getting cut down for land; buildings are sprouting atop mangrove forests which accelerates the pollution of the ocean and groundwater; literal shit is leaking into the cenotes; sargassum makes the beaches impossible for swimming for most months of the year; and the spirituality has been co-opted by a party scene, street drugs, and something called Biomagnetic Healing sessions that go for $305 USD for an 80 minute session.
So my question stands: what are foreigners investing in? Tulum, as it once was advertised, no longer exists. It’s no longer the jungle paradise promised to tourists. We have an entire industry in Tulum simulating the aesthetics of a jungle while killing the jungle and selling the promise of spiritual healing so long as you’re willing to fork out the cash in exchange for spirituality. Tulum is now the Gem of the Riviera Maya – gem as in extractable, extremely profitable once cut and polished. The developments destroyed the charm of the very place they’re advertising.
Tulum, as it once was advertised, no longer exists. It’s no longer the jungle paradise promised to tourists. It’s the Gem of the Riviera Maya – gem as in extractable, extremely profitable once cut and polished.
During our trip, I felt like I was doing Tulum wrong. Caio and I were so insistent on experiencing Tulum: the archaeological sites, the cenotes, the local food, the reef, but Tulum’s tourism industry kept insisting that we must consume Tulum, spend in Tulum, pose in Tulum, to collect evidence to prove to someone else that we could afford to be seen in Tulum while it was still trendy.
But what do we lose when we build for travel trends? Once the influencers find a new hotspot, the returns on investment dry up for developers, and the American restaurateurs and hoteliers find a more lucrative “untouched” town where they can capture the dollars of upwardly mobile westerners, then who will remain in Tulum to clean up the mess of this ecological and socioeconomic disaster in the making?
In writing this, my hope is not to shit on your vacation or even deter you from visiting Tulum. After all, I went, and I don’t regret my trip. But more than relaxation, Tulum gave me a sense of sobering reality about income inequality in extremely impoverished small towns that suddenly blow up and become a hot spot travel destination. The wealth disparity here is nothing like anything I’ve seen while traveling through European cities, and witnessing it changes the meaning of vacation and what it is to be a tourist. My hope is that if you do choose to visit Tulum, you can maybe be more conscious than I was, with a better awareness of what your dollars contribute to.
I’m not sure what the future holds for Tulum, especially with the recent opening of the military-owned-and-operated new airport near town and the ongoing construction of the much-protested Mayan Railroad, which cuts through the jungle and is predicted to increase Tulum’s population of 35,000 year-round inhabitants by nearly 48% in the next ten years.
Pere Sunyer, coordinator of the Bachelor’s Degree in Human Geography at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, has said that this population increase is not synonymous with economic development and better quality of life. “Since there is no planning of human settlements, access to decent housing, services such as drinking water, electricity, schools, and health centers, it is very likely that social problems will also grow,” said Sunyer.
He considers that immigration in the municipalities could trigger, in the long term, greater poverty, insecurity, and environmental deterioration.”
I dread a future where Tulum is known as a place that once was a natural wonder.
Tourism is always seen as an economic good until it gets out of control. In the case of natural oases like Tulum, there’s no the luxury of time to do damage control later. Cities throughout Europe are now implementing restrictions to curb the damages of over tourism. Ireland and several Australian states have implemented a taxation structure on homes that sit empty for more than 11 months a year. If the homes in Tulum are sitting empty for the majority of the year outside the peak season (meaning no one is living there to spend money and bring revenue into the town itself) that’s additional tax money that could be used towards building up the town’s infrastructure. Hell, while I’m doing my wishful thinking, why not tax business owners and developers and vacation homeowners whatever is needed to provide a universal basic income for the deeply impoverished native Mexican residents of Tulum, the very people whose labour built this place and keeps it running?
What I’m asking for is not impossible. It shouldn’t be just European countries who are given the opportunity to regulate their tourism industries while developing countries cower at the mercy of the western dollar. When Tulum is situated just 300 meters (328 yards) from the Mesoamerican Reef, the second largest barrier reef in the world, then this is ecological destruction that we just cannot afford to allow to play out.
I think we’re slow to admit the real damage caused by our tourism. Who amongst us wants to think about their actions while on vacation? But we’re lacking imagination in how to mitigate the harms of tourism, still insisting on catering to tourists first without thinking about the harms on fragile ecology and local residents, often forgotten in the quest to court foreigners and their money. I am not qualified to solve problems like this, but it doesn’t take advanced degrees to see that what we’ve been doing isn’t working, and that we can’t keep doing the same thing forever. We don’t have to keep perpetrating these boom-and-bust cycles in the few natural paradises we have left. We don’t need to sell out the future for a grid-worthy present.
Further reading
How Opportunism Made Tulum an Eco-Chic Playground — Sabrina Bustamante, Latina.
Who Killed Tulum? — Reeves Wiedeman, The Cut. (remove paywall here)
Mexico’s Maya Train accused of jeopardizing vital cave systems — Teresa De Miguel, El Pais.
Tulum’s locals fight evictions as developers move in — Mattha Busby, The Guardian.
62% of Tulum’s population lives below the poverty line (meaning they earn less than $2.15 USD/day) compared to Mexico’s national average of 36% of the population living below the poverty line. For comparison, in the US, 11.5% of the population lives below the poverty line.
I went into Google Maps in July 2023 and used Streetview to try and locate some of these developments and their ridiculous billboards, but the maps, last updated April 2022, show me only wild jungle on both sides of the major roads leading out of Tulum. In just 15 months, this natural growth was razed to make way for breaking ground on luxury developments.
Wow! A lot to take in...! When was this visit? Recently?