This story originally appeared on WIRED in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.
Widely mowed lawns and leafy trees, sports fields gleaming in the glow of lights, bouncy castles on children’s playgrounds –especially bouncy castles — something Celia Pérez Godínez envies. They are the attributes of the wealthy neighborhood to which she travels every day as a domestic worker in Cancún. Pérez envies the opulent.
She tells me about it, sitting on a rotten wooden bench one August afternoon, when her seven-year-old son is stuck on a broken path miles north of town, in a diminutive park full of trash and wild plants, not far from where Pérez lives, near the edge of town. As we talk, a homeless man in the background shouts and laughs, as if at a joke only he understands.
Pérez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. In 2013, she emigrated to Cancún, Mexico’s overhyped and wildly popular tourist destination. Rarely able to find enough time or money to go to the beach, and unable to find green spaces or decent, secure public spaces for her son to play, she has to make do with the few parks like this one that are available. It’s not the life she expected. “You hear Cancún is wonderful, but when you get here … it’s a letdown.”
At 54 years elderly, Cancún is Mexico’s youngest city. It was designed from the ground up in the 1970s as the country’s novel vacation destination. In that respect, it has been a huge success. But as an urban project, it’s a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, its sprawling urban population now exceeds 1 million. Before, much of the area was jungle; now it’s home to hundreds of hotels. Year after year, the accelerating development of real estate has eaten into the surrounding vegetation.
This growth has been an ecological nightmare, but also a social one, with huge unequal benefits for the city’s richer and poorer residents. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, a lecturer at the University of the Caribbean, most Cancun residents live without the minimal green spaces or public spaces needed for proper recreation, relaxation, rest or socializing. This is especially true in the regions where the most vulnerable live.
Click “Play” to see Cancún’s urban development from 1984 to 2022.
This inequality has developed despite Cancun’s rapid expansion, which has been eating up enormous amounts of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding region lost at least 30,000 hectares of jungle, according to Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. The land that was torn out is now home to housing and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, more developers are on the way. At the federal level, since 2018, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 applications for further land-use changes in the area. If approved, 650 hectares of jungle would disappear.
The public records show what urban development projects have been completed during that period, from 2,247 small, popular housing units on one side to a 20-story, 429-room all-inclusive luxury hotel. Crucially, none of them include proposals to expand or improve public parks or green spaces in a city that has already been bursting at the seams, having exceeded its tourist capacity for more than a decade.