How a Computer Helped Choose the Site for Cancún

Details

Modern Cancún can feel like a city that has always been there, but its resort development is surprisingly recent. The Mexican government began studying new places for major tourist developments in the late 1960s, hoping tourism could bring investment and jobs to less-developed regions. In 1967, funding was set aside for the feasibility work, which was handled by INFRATUR, an agency connected to the Bank of Mexico. The planners used an unusually data-heavy approach for the era. They gathered information about successful resort destinations, including tourist numbers, hotel capacity, temperatures, rainfall, and hurricane activity. That information was processed with a computer program to narrow a large group of possible locations down to a smaller set that could then be inspected by people on the ground. Cancún stood out because of its beaches, climate, access to water, proximity to major archaeological sites, and potential for tourism-driven economic development. The computer did not simply choose a beach by itself, but helped planners compare locations using measurable factors before field inspections and the final decision. Construction of the resort project began in January 1970. At that point, Isla Cancún had only three residents, who worked as caretakers of a coconut plantation. Nearby Puerto Juárez was a small fishing and military community. The new resort was deliberately planned rather than growing organically from an established city. The Mexican government financed the first hotels because private investors were initially reluctant to put money into an untested destination. The project expanded rapidly. Cancún became an early major example of a government-planned tourism center, later associated with FONATUR, and its population and tourism industry grew far beyond the scale envisioned at the beginning. Today, the city is a major international resort, making its nearly empty starting point one of the more striking examples of how data, government planning, infrastructure investment, and tourism can transform a landscape in a few decades.