Sargassum in Tulum now has a federal budget line. The government will spend 2 billion pesos on boats and barriers meant to catch the algae offshore before it reaches the sand.
President Claudia Sheinbaum presented the Sargassum Attention and Management Strategy on Thursday, July 30, naming Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Puerto Morelos, Tulum, and Mahahual as the five stretches of coast where the equipment will be concentrated. Alicia Bárcena, secretary of Semarnat, told the same briefing that 2026 has delivered four times the volume of 2025 and 27 times the historical average, a year she called difficult and atypical.
For Tulum, the announcement lands roughly seven months into a season that was supposed to start in April. Zofemat crews had already removed more than 2,800 metric tons from municipal beaches by mid-July, close to double the figure for the same stretch of 2025, and the equipment that is supposed to relieve them is still being purchased.
Bárcena puts 2026 at 27 times the historical average
The scale Semarnat described is easier to grasp offshore than on the beach. Bárcena said up to 90,538 metric tons of sargassum are moving through the Mexican Caribbean on a given day, and that roughly 9,000 tons of that mass reaches Quintana Roo's coast daily. Only a fraction of what floats ever lands, but the fraction has grown.
Her account of where it comes from starts in 2011, when the Sargasso Sea off Florida broke its containment, and the algae began drifting toward West Africa. It settled in the Tropical Atlantic between Africa and Brazil, where nutrient discharge and warmer water turned a natural habitat into a reproduction engine. Currents and wind carried the result back across to Quintana Roo.
The calendar moved with it. The arrival window used to open in April and close around September. This year the algae was on Tulum's sand in January.
Where the first 768.7 million pesos go
Phase one, running through 2026, carries 768.7 million pesos for equipment: two tugboats, six coastal sargassum vessels, 1.5 kilometers of dynamic barriers, and 50 kilometers of coastal containment barriers. Admiral Raymundo Pedro Morales, secretary of the Navy, laid out four lines of action behind the spending: collection in open water, collection in shallow water, cleanup on the beaches themselves, and final disposal.
The numbers show where the bet sits. Current capacity runs at about 1,227 metric tons a day at sea and 950 on the beaches. The new equipment is projected to lift the combined figure to 1,870 tons daily, with a target of 4,000 tons a day next year. Governor Mara Lezama, who has put more than 770 million pesos of state money into the problem during her administration, has argued for years that intercepting the algae in the water beats chasing it on the sand.
Semar's own collection totals explain the urgency. The Navy reported 92,782 metric tons collected in Quintana Roo during 2025 and 96,151 tons so far in 2026, the two heaviest years on record. Around 588 state and municipal workers are on the coast daily, alongside hotel crews.
Sargassum in Tulum has already filled 1,000 container trips
Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo walked Playa del Pueblo on July 15 with David Buchanan, director of Tulum's Zona Federal Marítimo Terrestre office, to review a cleanup operation that has not paused since the year began. Buchanan's crews have completed more than 1,000 container runs to transfer sites, hauling material that Zofemat alone counts at over 2,800 metric tons.
That figure covers municipal crews only. Hotels along the beach road run their own cleaning teams, and the volume they move does not appear in the municipal count, which means the real tonnage leaving Tulum's shoreline is higher than any single number published so far.
Cumulative national data compiled by Simsar, the monitoring system for collected sargassum, places Tulum as the most affected destination in the country between January 2022 and July 2026. Those totals sit awkwardly next to Semar's annual figures for Quintana Roo, and the two systems appear to be counting different things.
The aquifer risk under every pile
Buchanan has been direct about the part of the operation that gets the least attention. Removing the algae from the sand is only useful if the place it goes next does not create a second problem. Leachate from decomposing sargassum can reach the aquifer, the vegetation behind the dune, and the coastal fauna that depends on both.
The federal plan routes collected material to four prepared sites where it will be dried and pretreated for use in biofertilizer, biochar, and biogas. In Tulum, crews already lay the algae on geomembranes to dry, partly to recover sand before disposal and slow the beach erosion that aggressive cleaning causes.
The damage while it sits is well documented. Decomposition releases hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell that empties a beach club and irritates airways. Direct contact with decomposed algae can cause dermatitis, in part because of heavy metals absorbed from the water. In the shallows, thick mats block sunlight and strip oxygen, which pushes reefs and seagrass beds past what they tolerate.
A 4,000-ton daily target that lands next year
Sheinbaum said roughly 150 scientists are working with Semarnat and the Science Ministry on two questions: why this year produced so much, and what the collected biomass can profitably become. On October 1 and 2, Mexico hosts an EU-Caribbean Global Gateway conference on sargassum, funded by the European Union, with Caribbean nations attending to compare approaches.
The second phase, the one that carries collection to 4,000 tons a day, is written for next year. Tulum's crews have the rest of this season to get through before any of it arrives, and this year the season did not begin in April and shows no sign of ending in September.
Have the cleanup crews kept your stretch of Tulum beach usable this summer, or has the sargassum won the season? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.