Tempers flare amid restoration of Cancun's white beaches (Feature)

By Franz Smets Dec 31, 2009, 2:00 GMT

Cancun, Mexico - The end of the year is busy in Cancun, a world-famous resort on Mexico's Caribbean coast: the hurricane season is over, the temperature remains above 30 degrees Celsius and tourists are looking to celebrate the holidays.

On 30 kilometres of beaches, visitors from around the world enjoy the white sand and turquoise water.

And yet, in Cancun, sand is in fact a fleeting thing. The waves constantly wash the white gold off Mexico's main tourist destination to reveal the jagged white sandstone underneath.

Hurricane Wilma, which ravaged Cancun for 60 hours in October 2005, scoured away much of the city's sand. In 2006, sand was pumped back onto the beaches, but the next spell of bad weather carried it off again.

This time, sand is being distributed not just on the beaches but also at the bottom of the sea close to shore, which experts believe will be a more lasting restoration.

By early December, more than 1 million cubic metres of sand were pumped onto the beaches along the tourist hotels. By February, the new sand is expected to exceed 6 million cubic metres.

Mexico is set to spend close to 90 million dollars to rehabilitate Cancun's beaches.

The sand is necessary to attract tourists, who are one of the country's main sources of income. In the state of Quintana Roo, where Cancun and its 130 hotels are located, tourism is by far the largest employer.

The city emerged barely 40 years ago and now has about 800,000 residents, with an additional 60,000 people settling every year in Cancun.

'Without sand we would lose our jobs,' says Gaby, a waitress at the Gran Caribe Real hotel.

A few hundred metres off the Gran Caribe Real's beach, a huge dredging ship regurgitates a slurry of water and sand - which it swallowed up earlier from Cozumel island, about 40 kilometres away - through a steel tube more than 1 metre in diameter.

'We recently even went on strike and demonstrated, so that they brought us sand too,' Gaby says.

Hotel employees marched onto the beach holding signs with slogans like 'sand is my work' and 'no jobs without sand.'

The Real Resorts group, which owns two luxury hotels in the area, built a rock barrier off its facilities to prevent its beaches from washing away. The measure was believed to have worsened erosion on neighbouring beaches belonging to other hotel companies.

Mexico's environmental protection agency, Profepa, ordered the removal of protective beach measures at the Real Resorts group's hotels. Other hotel operators demanded sanctions against the two luxury facilities, regarded among the most successful in the area and with occupancy rates of more than 90 per cent even in the off season.

There were problems on Cozumel, where two dredging ships are getting a large portion of the sand they later distribute along Cancun.

Environmental activists and tourist operators on the island, which is a resort destination in its own right, complained about the dredging, but Quintana Roo Governor Felix Gonzalez Canto said there were no legal grounds to halt the removal of sand from Cozumel's shores.