Erosion transforms Mexico beaches

My perfect beach paradise is gone.

Not gone entirely, thankfully, but severely damaged, and almost overnight.

Blame Mother Nature or the human response, but this much is clear: There are no guarantees when it comes to planning the perfect vacation.

I wrote recently about a magical trip my extended family took over Thanksgiving to a Mexican resort about an hour south of Cancun on the Caribbean coast. The resort, the Iberostar Tucan, was enchanting in many ways: the junglelike setting, with native animals roaming the grounds; the upscale yet casual atmosphere in the public spaces and restaurants; and the beach — the beach! — wide and sugary, with a palette-expanding aquamarine surf.

The surf, apparently, is more than just beautiful to look at and fun to frolic in. It can be quite destructive.

About a month after my stay, strong waves washed away much of the Tucan's stunning beach, knocking over palm trees and lifeguard lookouts, leaving guests with a several-foot-high "cliff" of sand to scale before reaching the water.

I know this because an observant reader, who had been at the Tucan a few weeks before my family, wrote to me after viewing online photos of the damage, which occurred sometime in late December.

I was stunned at the transformation, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. Nearby resorts had been affected by the same erosion forces before my visit. The resort immediately north of the Tucan — the upscale Riu Yucatan — had an extremely narrow beach during my stay, and I remember thinking, "Boy, am I glad I'm not staying there."

Many of the folks now staying at the Tucan may be wishing they were elsewhere, despite furious efforts by the staff to rebuild the beach.

Lee Harris, a professor of ocean engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, is an expert on beach erosion and has been hired by governments and resorts in tourist areas around the world to help reclaim sand.

He recently visited the Playacar development, a resort area just south of the town of Playa del Carmen, which is where the Tucan and a dozen other upscale resorts are located.

He was surprised at the level of erosion along the beachfront and speculates that it is from a combination of natural and man-made causes — waves and wind, but also structures such as piers and breakwalls that prevent the natural rebuilding of beaches.

It doesn't help matters that the individual resorts are taking a piecemeal approach to the problem — installing breakwalls and giant sand "whales" that sometimes work and sometimes don't, but almost always have an effect on neighboring properties. "They need an overall plan," he said.

Though an elaborate, collaborative plan sometimes doesn't work either, acknowledged Harris, who has tried to help the Mexican government rebuild vanishing beaches in nearby Cancun, with only limited success.

Average travelers, however, may not care about what caused the problem or how to fix it — they just want to know that the beach in front of their resort will be perfect when they check in.

There are no guarantees, of course.

A hurricane, global warming, even a wind shift all cause evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary, changes to a beach.

You can research your destination to death and still be surprised by what you find when you arrive.

All of the research I did on the Tucan indicated I was going to one of the region's premier beaches. And it was spectacular. But my research was six months old by the time I got to Mexico.

And if the damage to the Tucan's beach had occurred a month earlier, I would have been out of luck.

Stephen Ryberg, who owns the beachfront Playa Maya Hotel in downtown Playa del Carmen, said he frequently is asked by prospective guests where the area's best beaches are. He usually hedges.

"The beach changes all the time from place to place in very unpredictable ways," Ryberg wrote in an e-mail. "We have seen as much as 50 feet of beach appear or disappear literally overnight. You go home one evening and you come back the next morning and the conditions were just right (or wrong, as the case may be), and the beach is 50 feet different from what it was the night before."

That may be small consolation for folks who save all year for one week in paradise and want everything to be perfect. Travel, alas, is not risk free. Still, most times, it beats staying home.