Today is an important day for Cancun and, like all birthdays, you celebrate the good, the bad and the not so good and not so bad and sometimes just making it from one to the other!! But, never a dull moment!! I have never regretted taking my vacation here 22 years ago this month. I arrived on April 28 or 29, 1987 for 2 weeks vacation and stayed for a month! Went back home and moved here permanently on July 25, 1987.Flying in over the turquoise-blue ocean, I knew my heart was lost! At the time, I heard there were about 225,000 people and about 10,000 hotel rooms. Cancun now has about 850,000 inhabitants, 148 hotels and 28,218 hotel rooms...not counting what has happened in the Riviera Maya in those last 39 years. The Riviera Maya has a few more than 30,000 hotel rooms when in 1996 there were less than 4,000--most of them in Playa del Carmen. Last year, a little over 8 million tourists visited the state of Quintana Roo: 3,265,591 in Cancun 3,215,862 in the Riviera Maya 924,451 in Cozumel and the rest, 619,517 divided between Isla Mujeres and Chetumal. All in all, Cancun has been the detonator of the tourism, business, job and population explosions in the State. And this growth due to the hard work and investment of local, national and international businesspeople, workers and inhabitants and mostly to the millions and millions of tourists who have come here and continue to come here for great vacations, great experiences and great friendships! ¡Feliz Cumpleaños Cancún! Thanks for the memories!
Wow, congrats Jim! Thanks for the stats on Cancun, you are a wealth of knowledge (I hope so after so many years, lol!) Oh, and happy birthday Cancun!
