The Lessons of Cancún, Fifty Years Later

In 1969, Cancún was not really a place. There was a narrow strip of sand off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, shaped roughly like a seven, and across the water a settlement of about 90 people. There was no bridge to the island, no airport, and Quintana Roo was not even a state yet. That was where a group inside Mexico’s central bank decided to build a tourist resort from scratch. Not because tourists were asking for Cancún — almost nobody had heard of it — but because Mexico needed more dollars and Americans were taking more beach vacations. Punta Cancun, 1970 The legend says a computer picked the spot. A New York Times piece from March 1972 tells a more interesting story. A 46-person team of bankers, architects, engineers, and economists inspected hundreds of sites over two years, flying on the central bank's currency-distribution planes. They fed everything they could measure into computers and used Banco de México's machines so heavily that th