Fifteen photographs taken during routine monitoring inside Parque Nacional Tulum opened at the Museo Regional de la Costa Oriental, a Tulum photo exhibition that comes down at the end of this week.
None of them were commissioned. They came out of the fieldwork the park's staff carries out with the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, the federal agency known as Conanp, and they show what the lens happened to find. Birds, insects, plants, fungi, and the stretches of forest and shoreline where all of it lives.
That leaves a narrow window. The show fills one room, the Sala Tunich, which keeps the museum's hours of Tuesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Authorities have asked residents and visitors to walk through it before the week runs out.
A pygmy owl, a white ibis, one monarch butterfly
The species on the wall read like a roll call of what this coast still holds. The ocellated turkey. The keel-billed toucan. The lineated woodpecker, the tecolote bajeño that birders elsewhere call the ferruginous pygmy owl, the white ibis, the northern cardinal, and a monarch butterfly. Vegetation from the park fills the remaining frames.
One of those names carries more weight than the rest. The ocellated turkey is endemic to the Yucatán Peninsula, and the IUCN Red List classifies it as near threatened with a declining population, squeezed by hunting and by the loss of the forest it depends on. A bird that exists nowhere else on the planet is hanging on a wall minutes from one of the most photographed shorelines in Mexico.
The cat is missing. No jaguar appears among the species the announcement lists, which is its own quiet lesson about how these images are made. Monitoring photographs record what walked past the camera, not what a curator wished had been there.
Taken on the job
Monitoring is repetitive by design. Staff go out, count what is there, and add another entry to the record that tells Conanp whether a protected area is holding or slipping. The camera serves that record. It was never pointed at a gallery.
Most of what monitoring produces ends up in reports and databases that almost nobody outside the agency opens. A museum wall is a different destination, and it is the reason a fifteen-image show is still worth the walk.
Parque Nacional Tulum runs along federal highway 307 between kilometers 179 and 183, and the terrain changes fast across that short stretch. Medium-height forest, wetlands, coastal dune vegetation, beaches and cenotes, in Conanp's own description of the park. Ocelots, jaguars and deer move through it.
Four years since the Jaguar decree
The exhibition marks an anniversary that belongs to a different piece of land. It is part of the commemoration of the fourth year of the Área de Protección de Flora y Fauna Jaguar, created by a decree published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on July 26, 2022, covering roughly 2,250 hectares beside the ruins.
Parque Nacional Tulum is the older neighbor. The two are separate federal designations administered by the same agency, which is why the photographs can come from the park while the anniversary belongs to the Jaguar area. The forest does not register the boundary. Neither do the birds in the frames.
Four years is also short enough that the Jaguar area is still building its public record. An exhibition of bird photographs is a modest way to mark it, and a deliberate one. It asks the visitor to look at the protected land as something with contents, not as a line on a map.
INAH argues the wildlife belongs beside the archaeology
The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia framed the show as a claim about heritage. Natural patrimony and cultural patrimony make up the same identity of the territory, the institute said, and both are a legacy that has to be preserved.
The building does most of that arguing on its own. The Museo Regional de la Costa Oriental sits at the entrance to the Tulum archaeological zone, inside the Parque del Jaguar, and it was built around the Maya settlements of this coastline. Hanging a toucan in it puts a living species in a room otherwise devoted to what people left behind.
For a visitor, the two halves arrive in the same afternoon. The walled city, then a photograph of the bird that still nests in the forest behind it.
The Tulum photo exhibition ends this week
Reaching the room costs less than it did three weeks ago. On July 17, the federal government announced a package for Tulum that made entry to the Parque del Jaguar free for Mexican visitors and set the archaeological zone at 80 pesos for Mexicans and 265 pesos for international visitors with full access. The electric transport inside the park was priced at 20 pesos, and Sundays were made free for Mexicans at the archaeological site and the protected area.
Anyone planning the trip this week should confirm the museum's own admission at the entrance, since the federal announcement addressed the park and the archaeological zone rather than each room inside them.
The announcement said nothing about what happens to the fifteen prints once the Sala Tunich empties, or whether they travel anywhere at all.
Should the monitoring images from Parque Nacional Tulum stay on public view permanently instead of for a single week? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.