The Mayor Says Tulum Beaches Are Almost Clean, Monitoring Data Tells a Messier Story

The Tulum sargassum season has loosened its grip on the shoreline, and Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo wants visitors to see it, promising municipal beach videos every two days.

Speaking to reporters, the mayor said the recent stretch of rain has considerably improved conditions along the coast, and that the town hall will build a sustained promotional effort around footage showing the current state of the sand. He put the beaches at somewhere between 70 and 80 percent clean.

The timing matters. Quintana Roo is closing out the heaviest sargassum year on record; Tulum has spent the summer near the top of the state's affected list, and hotel occupancy has suffered as a result. Castañón's estimate is the first optimistic municipal reading of the season, and he is putting a camera behind it.

A 70 percent estimate and a camera every two days

"The rains that came through cleaned the beach a lot. We are going to be going to the beach every two days to make videos inviting people to come," Castañón said, speaking in Spanish.

He acknowledged that the beaches are not completely free of the macroalgae. His argument is that conditions are now good enough to receive visitors, and that Tulum cannot afford to wait for a flawless shoreline before saying so.

The method is not new for him. Castañón has repeatedly used video shot from the sand during 2026 to report cleanup figures and announce beach access initiatives, a habit that has drawn both engagement and criticism from residents who say the footage does not always match what they find at the waterline.

Fifty additional Zofemat workers and two billion pesos from the federal budget

The mayor framed the improvement as the product of coordination rather than luck. He thanked Governor Mara Lezama for state backing and said the state Zona Federal Marítimo Terrestre had added 50 workers to cleanup crews.

He also pointed to the federal package announced by President Claudia Sheinbaum on July 30, which commits more than two billion pesos to sargassum containment, collection, and reuse across the Mexican Caribbean.

Navy Secretary Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles detailed the first stage at 768.7 million pesos, intended to raise daily collection capacity from 1,227 tons to 1,870 tons through two tugboats, six coastal sargassum vessels, and roughly 50 kilometers of containment barriers deployed across Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Puerto Morelos, Tulum, and Mahahual. A second stage targets 4,000 tons a day.

Why the Tulum sargassum retreat is real but uneven

Esteban Amaro Mauricio, who coordinates the state's sargassum monitoring center, told La Jornada in mid-August that arrivals peaked between June and July and have been declining gradually since then. He expects a considerable drop through September and October, and minimal landfall by November and December.

The caveat is where his reading and the mayor's diverge. Amaro described the decline as erratic and specifically named Tulum, alongside Mahahual, as a stretch still holding significant accumulations. Playa del Carmen has seen lighter arrivals. Puerto Morelos went from clean to a heavy landing inside a single week.

By August 21, he estimated the overall recale had dropped around 25 percent in recent weeks, enough for him to publicly question whether additional emergency spending still made sense this late in the cycle. That is a meaningful improvement. It is not a clean beach.

A season that arrived in January and broke the state record

The numbers behind the summer explain why a 70 percent estimate reads as good news. Environment Secretary Alicia Bárcena described the 2026 volume as four times the 2025 figure and 27 times the historical average, calling the year atypical.

Quintana Roo had collected roughly 110,000 tons by mid-August, with projections for the full year running as high as 150,000 tons. The 2025 total was close to 92,500 tons.

Tulum felt it early. The first arrivals landed in January rather than April or May, the first time that has happened in about 12 years of the phenomenon, and municipal crews had already removed more than 2,800 tons from public beaches by mid-July, nearly double the same period a year earlier. That figure excludes what hotels clear from their own frontage.

Castañón says the algae is not leaving

The mayor was direct about the longer horizon. He described sargassum as a phenomenon that has arrived to stay, and said Tulum needs a permanent strategy coordinated across the three levels of government rather than a seasonal response.

That position aligns him with the monitoring specialists, even where their read on current conditions does not. Amaro has warned that 2027 could open the way 2026 did, with arrivals starting in January rather than in spring.

The next checkpoints are already on the calendar. The sharpest seasonal drop is forecast for late September and October, and the federal government has scheduled an international sargassum meeting on October 1 and 2 with Caribbean nations and Japan. If the shoreline clears on schedule, Castañón's videos will have an easier subject to film. If the pattern repeats, the camera goes back out in January.

Have you walked a Tulum beach this week, and did it match the 70 percent figure? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.