40 Fun Facts About Riviera Maya

Which US president explored buying the island of Cozumel from Mexico as a place to resettle freed slaves?

Abraham Lincoln had his Secretary of State sound out Mexico's envoy in 1861, but President Benito Juárez dismissed the idea, and Cozumel still honours Juárez for it.

Because rain sinks straight into porous rock, the flat Riviera Maya has no surface examples of which landscape feature?

Rivers flow only below ground here: rainwater has dissolved channels through the rock, and divers have mapped more than 700 km of flooded passages under the jungle.

The ancient Maya paved long stone causeways across the Yucatán Peninsula, yet never used which invention to carry goods?

The wheel turns up on ancient Mesoamerican toys, but with no horses or oxen to pull a cart, every load travelled on human backs.

The Riviera Maya takes its name from famous resort coasts in France and which other European country?

Italy and France share the original Riviera, and tourism promoters borrowed the word in the late 1990s to rebrand a coast known only as the Cancún–Tulum tourist corridor.

Snorkelers in Akumal Bay, north of Tulum, swim beside which endangered animals that come to graze on sea grass?

Green sea turtles come into the bay to feed, and Akumal was declared a marine refuge in 2016 to shield them from the pressure of their own popularity.

Tulum takes its name from the Yucatec Maya word for which kind of structure?

Wall is what Tulum means, and the real thing is about eight metres thick, closing off every side of the city that the sea cliffs do not.

Before tourism, workers in the Riviera Maya's forests tapped trees for chicle, the original base of which product?

Chewing gum was made from chicle until cheaper synthetics took over in the 1960s; the Maya had chewed the sap long before and even used it to fill tooth cavities.

Which 2005 hurricane, the most intense recorded in the Atlantic, sat over Cozumel and Playa del Carmen for two days?

Wilma crossed the coast at walking pace, and together with Hurricane Emily earlier that year it stripped more than half the live coral from Cozumel's reefs.

The Riviera Maya's sandy beaches, running south from Cancún toward Tulum, face which body of water?

The Caribbean Sea washes the whole coast, warming from about 26 °C in January to 29 °C in August, so the swimming season never really ends.

The Riviera Maya lies entirely within which Mexican state, which only gained statehood in 1974?

Quintana Roo spent most of the 20th century as a thinly settled federal territory, created by decree of President Porfirio Díaz in 1902.

Cenotes form when the roof of a flooded cave collapses in which rock, the bedrock of the whole Riviera Maya?

Limestone slowly dissolves in groundwater until a cave ceiling gives way, and the Yucatán Peninsula alone has an estimated 10,000 of these water-filled sinkholes.

Tulum may once have been called Zama, a name linked to which daily event that the clifftop city faces?

Dawn fits because the ruins stand on a 12-metre bluff looking east across the water, straight into the rising sun.

Tulum served as the seaport of which inland Maya city, the hub of the Maya world's largest network of stone causeways?

Coba once held some 50,000 people, and its tallest pyramid, at about 42 metres, is among the highest on the peninsula.

Carvings at Tulum repeatedly show a winged Maya god in which unusual pose above the temple doorways?

Diving headfirst, the so-called Descending God wears a headdress and holds an object in his hands, and one of Tulum's three main buildings is named after him.

Maya traders arriving by canoe are thought to have used Tulum's clifftop Castillo as what?

A beacon is the likely role of its small shrine, which lines up with a break in the reef where canoes could reach a landing beach below the cliffs.

Which Spanish captain led the 1518 expedition whose members were the first Europeans to sight Tulum?

Juan de Grijalva sailed this coast a year before Cortés arrived, and a member of his expedition, Juan Díaz, wrote the first known mention of the clifftop city.

Which flooded cave system near Tulum, whose Maya name means Three Paths of Water, is the longest underwater cave known?

Ox Bel Ha has more than 500 km of surveyed passages, entered through over 160 cenotes, and it swapped the record back and forth with a neighbouring system for years.

Which landmark 2006 BBC nature series filmed inside the flooded Dos Ojos caves north of Tulum?

Planet Earth sent its cameras into Dos Ojos, which is named after two neighbouring sinkholes that look like a pair of eyes peering into the underground.

What do divers call the blurry layer in Riviera Maya cenotes where fresh water floats on denser salt water?

Halocline water swirls like a mirage because the two layers bend light differently, and near the coast it lies only 10 to 20 metres down.

Sian Ka'an, the vast biosphere reserve south of Tulum, has a Maya name meaning the place where what is born?

The sky is born, by its name, over a reserve of more than 5,000 square kilometres that takes in lagoons, coral and some 23 known Maya sites.

Which international designation did the Sian Ka'an reserve near Tulum receive in 1987, a year after it was created?

World Heritage Site status covers land and sea alike: the reserve shelters jaguars, pumas and Baird's tapirs on shore and a stretch of coral offshore.

Which invasive Indo-Pacific fish is damaging the reef off the Riviera Maya by devouring the species that clean coral?

Lionfish can eat up to 90% of the small reef-tending species in an area within a few months, leaving nothing to keep the coral clean and alive.

The reef off the Riviera Maya runs south past Belize and Guatemala to the Bay Islands of which country?

Honduras marks the far end of a chain that begins near Isla Contoy, north of Cancún, and touches four countries in all.

Paddlers leave Xcaret by canoe each year for Cozumel, re-creating an ancient pilgrimage to which Maya goddess?

Ixchel, linked with childbirth and weaving, drew pilgrims across the channel to her island shrine, and Xcaret park revived the crossing in 2007 as the Sacred Mayan Journey.

Cozumel, the island opposite Playa del Carmen, has a Maya name meaning the island of which birds?

Swallows gave the island its Maya name, Cuzamil, centuries before a deepwater pier built in the 1990s turned it into a regular stop for cruise ships.

Which familiar mammal has a critically endangered pygmy species that lives only on the island of Cozumel?

Raccoon populations cut off on the island evolved a smaller body, an effect called insular dwarfism that also produced Cozumel's own miniature coati and fox.

Akumal, now a snorkeling resort near Tulum, was founded in 1958 on a former plantation growing which crop?

Coconuts were the business here until Pablo Bush Romero, a Mexican businessman and diver, founded Akumal as a community for scuba divers.

Which pedestrian street lined with shops, clubs and restaurants forms the heart of downtown Playa del Carmen?

Quinta Avenida, Spanish for Fifth Avenue, is the spine of a city that grew from a small fishing town into the second largest in its state.

The Tren Maya railway, which serves the Riviera Maya, starts at Cancún's airport and ends at which Chiapas town?

Palenque, known for its own Maya ruins, is the far end of a 1,554 km line that circles the peninsula by two routes.

Río Secreto, a cave system near Playa del Carmen, was found when a farmer chased which animal into an entrance?

An iguana led him to 38 kilometres of semi-flooded caves hung with stalactites, only about a tenth of which are open to visitors.

Cochinita pibil, the slow-roasted pork of the Yucatán Peninsula, gets its burnt-orange colour from which spice?

Achiote, also called annatto, colours the citrus-marinated pork, which is traditionally wrapped in banana leaf and roasted in a pit dug in the ground.

Xcaret park near Playa del Carmen has its own temazcal, a traditional Mesoamerican form of what?

Sweat lodge steam in a temazcal comes from water poured over heated volcanic stones, which are used because they will not crack and explode in the heat.

From 2007, the El Camaleón course at Mayakoba in the Riviera Maya hosted the first Mexican event of which golf circuit?

PGA Tour golfers came back to the Riviera Maya for 16 years before the tournament moved across the country to Los Cabos in 2023.

Which drifting golden-brown seaweed has washed onto Riviera Maya beaches in record amounts since 2011?

Sargassum has piled up to three feet deep on some coasts, and Mexican projects now press it into building panels and turn it into biogas.

Which city near the border with Belize, far smaller than Cancún, is the capital of the Riviera Maya's home state?

Chetumal is Mexico's main trading gateway with Belize, yet it ranks only third in its state by population, behind Cancún and Playa del Carmen.

Which shipwrecked Spanish sailor became a Maya war leader and refused Cortés's 1519 invitation to rejoin his countrymen?

Gonzalo Guerrero stayed for the sake of his Maya wife and their children, who are counted among the first mestizos of the Americas.

During the 19th-century Caste War, Maya rebels south of Tulum rallied around which sacred object kept in their capital?

A talking cross appeared in 1850 and inspired the rebels to fight on, and their capital, Chan Santa Cruz, held out until the Mexican army occupied it in 1901.

The raised stone causeways that the ancient Maya built through the Yucatán jungle are called sacbeob, meaning what?

White roads may owe the name to the pale plaster that once coated them, and one famous example runs about 100 km through the jungle.

A ring of cenotes across the northern Yucatán traces the buried crater of the asteroid that wiped out which animals?

Dinosaurs died out after the asteroid struck about 66 million years ago, yet the crater stayed hidden until geophysicists prospecting for oil found it in the late 1970s.

Which slow-moving, filter-feeding fish gathers in seasonal feeding groups off the northeast Yucatán Peninsula?

Whale sharks are the largest fish alive, with one individual reliably measured at 18.8 metres, and the waters near Isla Contoy are among their gathering places.