Cancun: From fishing village to tourist colossus

It’s hard to believe that Cancun, in the late 1960s, was little more than a small fishing village.

In 1972, though, things started to change when planners built the first hotel on a 14-mile strip now known as the Hotel Zone, a narrow spit of land that overlooks both the Caribbean Sea and Nichupte Lagoon.

Today, exponential growth spurred by tourism has pushed the full-time resident population to 800,000, the number of annual visitors to 4 million, the number of hotels to 140 and the number of hotel rooms to 26,000. Just as significant, 20 percent of the city’s hotels have a Gran Tourismo rating, Mexico’s highest grade, said to exceed a five-star rating.

Wonder what prompted these impressive figures?