The postcard is back in Tulum this week

Sargassum in Tulum has dropped off along the hotel zone over the past several days, and the municipal beach office expects that coastline to be practically clean by the end of the week.

David Buchanan García, who heads the Zona Federal Marítimo Terrestre office in Tulum, said the decline has been general across the hotel zone and parts of Parque Nacional del Jaguar. Saturday was the exception, with a considerable number of arrivals along several stretches of coast.

The timing is what gives the week its weight. Tulum is coming out of the heaviest collection year Quintana Roo has seen, into the weeks when the winter season is decided, and Buchanan said the return of the watercolor changes how visitors read a beach, even when small accumulations remain at the shoreline.

One heavy Saturday inside a quieter week

Buchanan put the trend plainly.

We have had a drop in landings over the past few days.

He pointed to rain and to shifts in the marine currents as factors in how the water looks and where the macroalgae travels, and he attached the caveat his own crews have lived with since January. The behavior changes from one day to the next.

Less weight on the sand each morning means the crews finish faster, which is the mechanical reason the turquoise comes back before the calendar says the season is over.

7,300 tons of sargassum in Tulum, and 2,024 container trips

Zofemat's running count reached 7,300 tons as of Saturday, October 17, and was moved to the disposal site in 2,024 container loads.

Measured against the office's previous public figure, more than 6,500 tons and more than 1,800 trips as of September 17, the month between the two readings added roughly 800 tons and about 200 trips, by our arithmetic. June and July moved that much in days.

The municipal count is not the only number attached to this municipality. The state environment secretariat's breakdown, published a day after Buchanan's September cut, placed Tulum at 17,990.27 tons. The two offices are measuring different operations along different stretches, and neither has published a reconciliation.

Where the tons end up is a question that changed in August, when the federal government reclassified sargassum from waste to resource, opening a legal path for private use of the material. No processing arrangements have been announced for what leaves Tulum's beaches on those container trips.

Six days ago, this coast was flagged red

The improvement is recent and not evenly spread. On October 14, a fresh landing hit several points of the Tulum shoreline, with stretches rated red and orange on the daily beach monitor.

Offshore, the reading has eased since the start of the month. The Navy's Instituto Oceanográfico del Golfo y Mar Caribe moved its signal to green in early October and reported about 3,920 tons of floating material in the Mexican Caribbean on October 8, a fraction of what it had tracked in the summer. The state reported 9,450 meters of anti-sargassum barriers operating in July across Puerto Morelos, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Mahahual, inside a plan for 16,030 meters.

The annual total is the figure that will not move. Óscar Rébora Aguilera, head of the Secretaría de Ecología y Medio Ambiente, put statewide collection at 138,000 tons at the start of October, which the secretariat calls a record for Quintana Roo and which runs 67.2 percent above the 92,782 tons gathered across all of 2025. His projection for the close of the year is above 150,000. Landings began in January this year rather than March, so the season never had a clean opening date to measure from.

"The sargassum is not arriving anymore"

Neiber Roel García, captain of waiters at Las Palmas beach, described a change he can measure in his own shifts. For weeks, the crews cleaned the sand daily, only to find it buried again by the next morning.

The sargassum is not arriving anymore.

Since the weekend, he said, the beaches have begun clearing on their own, and the sand has drawn a sizable crowd, most of it from the region, with people spending a day off at the water.

Occupancy of 10 to 20 percent, with December as the target

Roel García put current occupancy at 10 to 20 percent. He expects to pass 50 percent next month and better numbers in December, when the sector counts on local, national and international visitors to carry the final quarter, and he said the service has to hold up for whoever shows.

His estimate sits well below the official municipal average and aligns with what the hotel sector has said specifically about the beach road. The state's weekly cut for September 26 to October 2 put Tulum at 42.1 percent, a figure that blends the coast with the town. On September 10, the president of the Asociación de Hoteles de Tulum, David Ortiz Mena, placed coastal zone establishments under 20 percent.

The water cleared on a stretch of coast that is largely empty.

Our guide to Tulum's free and public beaches sets out which stretches are open without a minimum consumption requirement, which was the access question that ran through the municipal messaging all summer.

Buchanan's forecast contains a condition. The hotel zone is practically clean by the close of the week only if the landings stay down and the crews keep pace, and his own office says the macroalgae can turn around overnight. The next container count out of the Zofemat yard measures the first half of that. Roel García will read the second half off the number of tables he fills in November.

Have you been down to the Tulum hotel zone this week, and what did the water actually look like? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.