Tulum Attracted Record Visitor Numbers This Summer

Image: PHOTO: The beach and ruins of the Maya civilization in Tulum. (photo via SL_Photography / iStock / Getty Images Plus)
Image: PHOTO: The beach and ruins of the Maya civilization in Tulum. (photo via SL_Photography / iStock / Getty Images Plus)
Janeen Christoff
by Janeen Christoff
Last updated: 2:06 PM ET, Wed September 5, 2018

Tulum has long been popular with visitors to the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The impressive archaeological sites and beautiful beaches are one of the region's most enticing attractions and the sites are clearly gaining in popularity with visitation reaching record numbers over the summer.

According to a report in the Riviera Maya News, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found that visitation surpassed numbers from the previous summer.

These numbers are extremely encouraging because they show that, despite Tulum's beaches being affected by an influx of sargassum, visitors were not deterred from visiting the area.

According to Adriana Velazquez Morlet, a delegate of the INAH, more than 300,000 visitors came to Tulum in the summer of 2018, which is 50,000 more than the previous summer where visitors numbers reached 250,000 people.

"We had the impression that we were going to have fewer visitors because of the sargasso, but as the season got underway, it was an exceptional season in terms of visitors where we had more than 300,000. It is a record number. The number of foreign visitors has grown a lot," Velazquez Morlet told the Riviera Maya News.

Tulum is one of the most popular archaeological sites in Mexico and is especially popular with international visitors.

Teotihuacan is the most visited of Mexico's archaeological sites, however, 80 percent of visitors are Mexican nationals. At Tulum, 80 percent of the visitors are foreigners.

Currently, there are 13 archaeological zones open to the public in Quintana Roo with the potential for an additional site, Chakanbakan.


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