Children enrolled in a Tulum environmental education program visited the Museo Regional de la Costa Oriental this summer, touring its halls to learn how the region's natural and cultural heritage is studied and protected.
The visit was part of the second edition of Pequeños Guardianes de la Naturaleza, a summer course run by Parque Nacional Tulum under the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. Behind the field trip sits a larger calculation. In a municipality where tourism and construction keep reshaping the coast, the agencies charged with protecting it are trying to reach residents early, before habits and attitudes harden.
A summer course for the region's youngest conservationists
Pequeños Guardianes de la Naturaleza is organized by Parque Nacional Tulum, part of the federal agency known as CONANP, as environmental education aimed at younger generations. The program has now reached its second edition, a sign that the park intends to keep it running rather than treat it as a single event.
Organizers said the course seeks to spark an early interest in protecting ecosystems and to build awareness about conserving Tulum's natural resources. The visit to MURECO gave that goal a concrete setting, moving the lessons out of a classroom and into a space built around the region's own history.
Inside the guided visit to MURECO
During the tour, participants moved through the museum's exhibition halls and received information about the biodiversity, history, and cultural richness of the region. Guides led the explanations, supported by audiovisual materials that turned dense subjects into something a child could follow.
The venue is not incidental. The Museo Regional de la Costa Oriental opened in September 2024 inside Tulum's Parque del Jaguar, built through the federal Promeza program under the National Institute of Anthropology and History. It holds 359 archaeological and contemporary works across three permanent halls and roughly 1,200 square meters of exhibition space, and it has become the largest museum in the network tied to the Maya Train.
MURECO has also built an education track since opening. It has trained local guides and welcomed school groups, so a summer course arriving with children fits a pattern the museum has been developing rather than a one-time booking. Since opening, it has drawn more than 98,000 visitors. Its galleries trace the eastern coast of Quintana Roo from its earliest human presence to contemporary Maya culture, which gave the young visitors a long view of the place they are being asked to protect.
The Pasaporte MURECO turns the tour into missions
The children also took part in the Pasaporte MURECO, a dynamic that asks each participant to complete a set of missions while moving through the museum. Every finished task reinforces what they have just seen, converting a walkthrough into a game with small goals along the way.
The design reflects a familiar principle in environmental education. Retention improves when learning is active rather than passive, and a passport that has to be filled gives a child a reason to study each hall instead of drifting past it.
A Tulum environmental education program with a longer horizon
MURECO highlighted its collaboration with CONANP, framing the joint activities as a way to bring children closer to the region's heritage through experiences that are both educational and recreational. For the museum, the partnership stretches its role beyond exhibitions. For the park, it puts a cultural institution to work in the service of conservation.
There is a deliberate logic to holding an environmental course inside a history museum. The program treats the region's natural systems and its cultural past as a single inheritance, teaching children that the mangroves and the Maya record belong to the same story of the coast.
The stakes are specific to Tulum. Parque Nacional Tulum covers roughly 664 hectares along the coast and is the only terrestrial protected natural area in the Cancún to Tulum corridor, one of the busiest tourism strips in the country. Its beaches are nesting grounds for loggerhead and green sea turtles, and its mangroves and cenotes anchor a coastline under steady development pressure. The park brings its own tools to that work, operating a nature and Maya culture interpretation center that gives the course a second classroom outdoors.
Organizers described the summer sessions as one part of a continuing effort to strengthen environmental education and to promote respect, responsibility, and participation in conservation among the region's children. Whether a guided visit and a stamped passport translate into lasting habits will not be measurable for years. For now, the institutions behind Pequeños Guardianes de la Naturaleza are working from a simple premise. Conservation is easier to teach before it has to be learned the hard way.
Do programs like this do enough to prepare Tulum's children to protect the coast they will inherit? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.