Sargassum in Tulum is hauled off the public beach at Conchitas every day, an operation the municipal government put on display during its latest supervision visit, with sea turtle nests marked across the same stretch of sand.
Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo walked the shoreline with David Buchanan, general director of the municipal Federal Maritime and Terrestrial Zone office, known as ZOFEMAT. The visit was meant to verify that collection at Conchitas is running on its daily schedule, according to the municipal statement.
"We are here at Conchitas beach with the beach cleaning team," Castañón Trejo said. "As happens every day, it is being cleaned so that we have the best beaches possible. We are working in close coordination with the federal government and the state to fight this natural phenomenon together."
The routine carries more weight this year than in previous ones. Quintana Roo is running the heaviest sargassum season in its records, Tulum's own collection has roughly doubled year over year, and the algae is landing during the months when sea turtles nest on the same beaches.
2,800 tons of sargassum in Tulum by mid-July
Buchanan reported in July that crews had removed more than 2,800 tons from Tulum beaches since the start of 2026, nearly double the volume logged over the same period in 2025. Brigades had completed over a thousand container trips to transfer points by that date.
The season also opened early here. The first significant landings reached Tulum in January rather than April, and the Simsar monitoring system has identified the municipality as the most affected destination in the country between January 2022 and July 2026, although figures vary between the tracking systems in use.
What the municipality has not published is a breakdown by beach. There is no public figure for how much of the Tulum total came off Conchitas, or how much the crews move there on an average morning.
Only five beaches in the state are clear
The statewide picture is what makes a daily cleanup at one public beach a story rather than a routine notice. Quintana Roo's environment secretariat, SEMA, reported an accumulated total of 106,848 tons on August 14. Of the 140 beaches it monitors along the coast, 52 registered excessive sargassum that week. Five were clear.
Tulum appears in the excessive category alongside Playa del Carmen, Puerto Morelos, the northern zone of Cancún and southern Mahahual.
Federal Environment Secretary Alicia Bárcena said in early August that the volume floating off the state, more than 90,000 tons at the time, runs 27 times above the historical average. Collection capacity across the Mexican Caribbean stands near 1,200 tons a day, roughly a third of what arrives.
Cleaning coordinated with the Navy
Work on the sand combines manual collection with mechanical equipment, and the municipality has run it alongside the Mexican Navy, the state government and hotel operators through the season. The Navy has also installed containment barriers at four points along the coast, Tulum among them, to hold back part of the algae before it reaches the shoreline.
The coordination is what moves the volume. Algae pulled off the beach has to be loaded and trucked inland to transfer points, which is where the thousand container trips counted in July came from. Tulum added equipment to the operation in June and has described the work as year-round rather than seasonal.
"We are seeing that there are many turtle nests"
During the same visit, the mayor asked residents and visitors to keep away from the nests marked along that shoreline.
"We are seeing that there are many turtle nests," Castañón Trejo said. "We invite everyone to care for them and respect them."
The overlap is on the calendar every year. Four of the world's seven sea turtle species nest on this coast, and the Tulum nesting season runs from May 1 to November 1. That puts the heaviest weeks of the sargassum arrival on top of the months when females come ashore to lay, and hatchlings make their run to the water.
Municipal guidance throughout the season asks beachgoers to keep their distance from marked nests, switch off lights pointed at the sand after dark, and report sightings of nesting females or disoriented hatchlings to 911. The municipality operates a protection camp at Kanan Ak.
The nesting calendar ends November 1
Nest counts for the 2026 season in Tulum have not been made public. In 2025, the municipal ecology department reported 658 nests by mid-July and projected more than 10,000 for the year. A comparable figure for this season has not been released.
The nesting calendar has a fixed end date. Sargassum does not, and the crews at Conchitas will be back on the sand tomorrow.
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