CANCUN HISTORY

Cancun’s Earliest Days

Around AD 200 Cancun and its surroundings were home to the Mayas, a striving culture interested in observing the cosmos, being Coba one of their most important cities. Cancun’s Mayan influence is easy to observe all around, even in its name coming from the Mayan words “Ka'an Ku´un”. According to the most generalized version, they mean “Nest of Serpents”, but there are others that believe these words denote “Yellow Serpent” due to the sight of the shape of a yellow serpent on the Hotel Zone of Cancun at dawn.

Cancun in the Discovery of America

After America was discovered, several attempts to reach this end of Yucatan’s Peninsula were made by the Spaniards, but most of them ended up in shipwrecks. Gonzalo Guerrero, one of the survivors, married a Mayan woman and had the first mestizo. The Spanish invasion took place in 1519, and Guerrero fought them faithful to the Mayas, while Jeronimo de Aguilar, another survivor of the shipwreck served the Spaniards as a translator.

The Spanish Invasion

The Spanish conquest of this region happened in a climate of conflict, although most of the Mayan sites had already been abandoned, including Chichen Itza and Uxmal. The remaining ones opposed resistance. For instance, Xel- ha, that struggled to contend the Spanish army and eventually succumbed to their forces becoming the first Spanish settlement. However, the frequent pirate attacks also prevented the Spaniards from taking over the area for a long time.

The region continued housing battles for centuries, especially when the Mayas began the “Caste Wars” in an attempt to retaliate all the harm they had endured from the white people. From 1847 to 1901, the Mayas fought to recover what had been stolen, destroying most of the colonial inheritance of the area, but they didn’t prevail. The remaining Mayas had to settle in the jungle.

In 1902, Dictator Porfirio Diaz proclaimed the area as the state of Quintana Roo, what seemed to stop the rebellions.

Development of Cancun as a world-class resort

Cancun itself remained unknown as an area of unexplored beaches and inhospitable jungle. It was not until late 1960’s that President Echeverria, helped by a computer program, selected it as a potential tourist destination. The project consisted basically of the construction of a nearby airport, the establishment of a residential zone and the development of a tourist district.

Although this project was not carried out until 1970, it was finished in 1974 and Kankun, as it appeared in some maps of Cancun at the time, started welcoming tourists from US, Canada and Europe.

Suddenly, the island of Cancun became the tropical paradise for vacationers as it had been advertised, and the small city of Cancun started to prosper as well.

In no time, Cancun began gaining international recognition and in 2003, it hosted the 2003 World Trade Organization talks and the refusal on the parts of various developing nations to sign the agreement as much as the protests against the event, caused enormous controversy worldwide, placing Cancun in the historical records of the World.

Having suffered the battering of hurricane Wilma in 2005, now Cancun has made the best of the situation and with its renovated properties or even new ones, it assures you sparkling novelty, even if you are a return visitor.

More than ever, Cancun can be proud of its name of Mayan ascendance “Yellow Serpent” that seems to indicate that Cancun is indeed a mythological creature that sheds its old skin to renew.