---
node: spot_cancun_cancun_hotel_zone
type: spot
slug: cancun_hotel_zone
destination: dest_cancun
title: "Hotel Zone"
lead: "Cancún's Hotel Zone is a sandbar 22 kilometres long and a few hundred metres wide, holding the hotels between the Caribbean and a lagoon. The whole resort was planned from nothing by the Mexican government in 1970."
published: 2026-08-12
updated: 2026-08-12
image_file: spot_cancun_cancun_hotel_zone.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zona_Hotelera,_Canc%C3%BAn,_Q.R.,_Mexico_-_panoramio_(105).jpg"
image_author: "Максим Улитин"
image_license: "CC BY 3.0"
---

## Overview

A computer model picked the site: the Bank of Mexico wanted a beach resort to earn foreign currency, and Cancún was a fishing settlement of a few hundred people when construction began. The strip is one road, Kukulcán Boulevard, numbered by kilometre, and every address is a point along it. Beaches are public by law even where a hotel fronts them, and marked public access points exist along the strip.

## Highlights

The beaches north of kilometre 9 face the lagoon side of the hook and have calmer water; south of it the open Caribbean has surf and, in some months, sargassum. Buses run the length of the boulevard for a few pesos and are the only sane way to move. For a day away from the strip, the ferry to Isla Mujeres leaves from Puerto Juárez in the town, not from the zone.