Cancún's History

The first known settlers of the area, the Mayans arrived in what is now Cancún centuries ago, and their ancestors remain in the area to this day. During the golden age of the Mayan civilization (also referred to as the classic period), when other areas on the peninsula were developing trade routes and building enormous temples and pyramids, this part of the coast remained sparsely populated. Consequently Cancún never developed into a major Mayan center; excavations have been done at the El Rey ruins (in what is now the Zona Hotelera), showing that the Mayan communities that lived here around AD 1200 simply used this area for burial sites. Even the name given to the area was not inspiring: In Mayan, Cancún means nest of snakes.

When Spanish conquistadores began to arrive in the early 1500s, much of the Mayan culture was already in decline. Over the next three centuries, the Spanish largely ignored coastal areas like Cancún -- which consisted mainly of low-lying scrub, mangroves, and swarms of mosquitoes -- and focused on settling inland where there was more economic promise.

Although it received a few refugees from the War of the Castes, which engulfed the entire region in the mid-1800s, Cancún remained more or less undeveloped until the middle of the 20th century. By the 1950s, Acapulco had become the number-one tourist attraction in the country -- and given the Mexican government its first taste of tourism dollars. When Acapulco's star began to fade in the late '60s, the government hired a market-research company to determine the perfect location for developing Mexico's next big tourist destination -- and the company picked Cancún.

In April 1971, Mexico's President, Luis Echeverria Alvarez, authorized the Ministry of Foreign Relations to buy the island and surrounding region. With a $22 million development loan from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the transformation of Cancún began. At the time there were just 120 residents in the area, most of whom worked at a coconut plantation; by 1979, Cancún had become a resort of 40,000, attracting more than 2 million tourists a year. And that was only the beginning: today, more than 500,000 people live in Cancún, and the city has become the most lucrative source of tourist income in Mexico.