What visitors to Cancun don’t see is the vast concrete jungle

This story was originally appeared on Wired en Español And it is translated from Spanish.

Wide lawns and leafy trees, playgrounds glittering in their lights, bouncy castles in children’s playgrounds—especially Bouncy castles – Celia Pérez Godínez is jealous. These are the decorations in the wealthy neighborhood she visits every day as a domestic worker in Cancun. Pérez is jealous of the rich.

She tells me this one August afternoon, sitting on a rotted wooden bench, her 7-year-old son traipsing his scooter across a broken path in a small park several miles north of town. The place, strewn with trash and wild vegetation, is a short walk from Perez’s home, close to the outskirts of town. As we talk, a homeless man in the background yells and laughs as if he’s hearing a joke that only he understands.

Pérez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. She migrated to Cancun, Mexico’s overhyped and hugely popular tourist destination, in 2013. She rarely has enough time or money to go to the beach and can’t find green areas or decent, safe public spaces for her son to play, so she has to make do with the few parks like this one. It’s not the life she expected. “You hear that Cancun is amazing, but when you come here … it’s a disappointment.”

At 54, Cancun is Mexico’s youngest city. It was designed from the ground up in the 1970s as a new holiday destination in the country. In that sense it has been a great success. But as an urban project it is a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, the city now has an urban population of over 1 million. Most of the area was once jungle; today there are hundreds of hotels. Rapid real estate development has destroyed much of the surrounding vegetation year after year.

This growth has been a nightmare not just environmentally but also socially, giving very unequal benefits to the city’s rich and poor residents. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, an academic at the University of the Caribbean, most people in Cancun live without the minimum green areas or public spaces necessary for proper recreation, leisure, rest or social interaction. This is especially true in areas where the most vulnerable people live.

This inequality has developed despite Cancun’s rapid expansion, which has consumed a huge amount of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding area lost at least 30,000 hectares of forest, according to data from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. The land stripped of forest is now home to residential and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, there’s a lot more development coming. At the federal level, since 2018, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 requests for further land use changes in the area. If approved, another 650 hectares of forest would disappear.

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