---
node: spot_cancun_isla_mujeres
type: spot
slug: isla_mujeres
destination: dest_cancun
title: "Isla Mujeres"
lead: "Isla Mujeres is an island eight kilometres off Cancún, five kilometres long and barely six hundred metres wide. The Spanish named it for the female figures they found in a shrine to the Maya goddess Ixchel."
published: 2026-08-12
updated: 2026-08-12
image_file: spot_cancun_isla_mujeres.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punta_Sur,_Isla_Mujeres,_Quintana_Roo.jpg"
image_author: "Suwanosejima"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

## Overview

The island keeps a working town at the north end, a road down the spine, and the ruins of the Ixchel shrine on the cliff at Punta Sur, the easternmost point of Mexico and the first place in the country to see the sunrise. Playa Norte at the town end is a shallow white-sand beach that shelves so gently you can wade a long way out. Golf carts are the standard transport and the island can be circled in an hour.

## Highlights

Take an early ferry from Puerto Juárez rather than the Hotel Zone piers, which cost more and run less often. Punta Sur has a sculpture park and the shrine, and is worth the cart ride for the cliff alone. The MUSA underwater sculpture museum is dived and snorkelled from here, in water shallow enough that snorkellers see most of it.