Cancun

Cancún did not evolve so much as get planned. In the 1970s, Mexican developers picked a sandbar off the Yucatán coast, largely uninhabited, and built a resort corridor from scratch, choosing the site for its reef-fringed beaches rather than any existing settlement. What emerged is really two cities: the Zona Hotelera, a slender strip of hotels facing the Caribbean, and downtown Cancún on the mainland, where most of the population actually lives, works and eats.

The Zona Hotelera curves in a rough number seven, lagoon on one side and open sea on the other, lined almost end to end with resorts, malls and clubs built to a scale that has little to do with Mexican vernacular architecture. It is efficient, air-conditioned and largely self-contained, designed for visitors who may never leave the strip during their stay.

Downtown, the character changes. Parque de las Palapas and the surrounding streets carry on with market stalls, taquerias and a slower, more ordinary pace, closer in spirit to other Yucatán towns than to the beachfront a few kilometres away. This is also the gateway to the wider region: the Riviera Maya's parks and reefs to the south, and inland, the ruins that made this peninsula significant long before any hotel was built.

The Maya presence is not a backdrop but the actual foundation of the region's identity. Chichén Itzá, a few hours inland, was a major political and religious centre centuries before Spanish contact, and its scale still humbles visitors who arrive expecting only beach. Cancún, in that sense, functions as a comfortable base camp for a much older landscape.