I recently walked the whole hotel zone beaches. Beaches are so weird. So much of the beach just is not that great. I know it comes and goes but right now it is more of the latter. First my observations: the best beach right now from the Hyatt Caribe to Carissa/Palma (the beach literally ends at Carissa/Palma). That is a pretty subjective statement so when I say best beach I mean the best sand quality not necessarily the biggest. I really love the fine white sand and in front of Le Blanc/Bayview Grand/Maralago/Girasol the sand is the fine white powder that I love so much. Some of the sand in other places is not sand at all rather just shells that are difficult to even walk on. We encountered this on the north end of Playa Delfines and infront of Royal Mayan and in a few other spots north. The absolute worst "beach" was the Royal Cancun to the Real. No beach at all. Just sandbags and rusty rebar. Last year we spent time at Solymar and the beach was quite big –though it was not my favorite in terms of quality. Now the beach is mostly a huge pile of sand against the beach wall with a steep incline to where the waves crash on the huge rocks. The best beach in the south end is from the Westin past Lahia and in front of Villas Nizuc. There the beach is quite large and really flat. So much of the beach now is angled steeply to the water, it is not flat like it used to be where the waves broke further out and the energy seemed to be dispersed. In front of Villas Nizuc was like that today. We had a nice swim there. I guess I am just wondering…are the beaches changing and this just happens from time to time? Has the construction changed how the waves react to the shore during a storm ie hitting a wall instead of going into the lagoon? Did pumping in sand last year do more harm than good? Just wanted some input. On one of the large limestone rocks on the shore someone had carved their name and ’87 so I suspect this is not the first time the beach looked like this. By the way, the color of the water is still breathtaking.
From my observations, it seems that the ouchy shell situation is a result of the sand restoration. It was never like that before and it was hard to go shell collecting on the ocean side prior to it. Right now it's super easy which can be considered a bonus, but of course it does hurt your feet a little. While beaches will always change, they have changed a lot since Wilma and it seems that Dean did a good job of changing the beaches once more. I know this was discussed before, but if you take the sand from one part of the ocean and put it in another, it doesn't just stay like that. It appears as though the ocean has once again done a major shift.
The main reason that the beaches are once again vanishing in spite of the restoration, is because the hotels and city tried to do it on the cheap, not paying for the off-shore sandbar that would have protected the beaches. So here we are again less than two years later, needing another restoration project.
I have walked Cancun's entire length of beach (from Puerto Cancun all the way to Punta Nizuc) several times in the last 4 years. I've never walked it all in one day, but parts at a time over a few weeks. And each time it was different. My experience is that along the long side of the 7 the beaches can change quite a lot in a short time. There seems to be less change along the top of the 7. My understanding is that Cancun's island is basically a sandbar. And if no buildings were placed on it then it would naturally shift position over time, it would move inland inch by inch into the lagoon. Since we've now got hotels there it is something of an uphill battle to keep the sea from naturally pushing the sand away from the buildings. I also understand that beach erosion is worse when there is a fixed building around which the sand can come and go. If there were no buildings I think that the sand would shift around and you wouldn't see such big changes. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I did read an article in Nat'l Geo a few years ago about this same issue affecting the outer banks of North Carolina. What I remember is that all that concrete in the foundations helped exaggerate the erosion that came from natural wave action. My personal opinion is that they should rip down all the buildings in the hotel zone and make the entire island a national park. They should put all the hotels in the city on the mainland and then let people rides bikes and take a trolley or something out to the beach. Of course I'm about 40 years too late with this idea, I realize that...