One official decision stands between Tulum's two free beaches and their first Platino certificate

Playa Conchita and Playa del Pueblo went through their first beach certification audit in mid-August, and Tulum will not learn whether they passed until October.

David Buchanan García, who runs the Zona Federal Marítimo Terrestre office in the municipality, said the evaluator's early comments on both beaches were good, and then drew the line himself. "It is the first time in history that these two beaches are certified, so we are very happy. We came away with a good grade. We still do not have the result, because the process is long, but they will give us the news in October," he said. Nothing can be treated as won, he added, until the official result arrives in writing.

The two beaches carry more weight than the paperwork does. Everything Tulum has certified so far sits inside Parque Nacional Tulum or up the coast at Akumal. Conchita and Del Pueblo are the free access points on the hotel zone road; anyone can walk onto either stretch without a beach club minimum.

The sargassum does not count against the score

Buchanan García said the presence of sargassum is not a criterion for evaluating damage, because it is a natural phenomenon. The evaluator looked instead at waste management, the state of the dunes and their vegetation, and the safety setup on the sand.

"What is sought is a safe beach, a clean beach, with no glass, no bottle caps and no cigarette ends," he said. The review also covers the lifeguards, whether they are trained and whether they carry the medicines and the knowledge to act if someone is hurt.

Playa Platino is not a government prize. It is a certification scheme run by the Instituto Mexicano de Normalización y Certificación, the standards body now operating as the Instituto Mexicano de Estandarización y Evaluación de la Conformidad, and municipalities enter their beaches one by one. Cancún, which called itself the national leader in these distinctions in 2023, described the structure at the time as an annual certificate graded in four branches: cleanliness, safety, services and water quality.

Both accesses opened last November

When Mexico's tourism secretary, Josefina Rodríguez Zamora, listed Tulum's new public beach entrances in November, she placed Playa Conchita at kilometer 4.5 of the hotel zone road and the Playa del Pueblo access at kilometer 5.5. They arrived as part of the national push for free public access to the country's beaches, on a coast where most of the frontage answers to a hotel or a club.

The beaches already holding the Platino certificate in Tulum are Pescadores, Maya and Santa Fe, all three inside the national park, plus Aventuras at Akumal. That is the list Buchanan García gave this week.

The public record is not entirely consistent on that count. In November, when the municipality collected its certificates at the fifth Encuentro de Playas Sustentables, La Jornada Maya reported five certified beaches rather than four, with Playa Mangle joining for the first time. The same report put Tulum at 100 percent compliance during the inspection phase and recorded its first Bandera Blanca certificate, under the Mexican standard NMX-AA-120-SCFI-2016, for Pescadores, Maya and Santa Fe.

What the second cleanup crew picks up

Zofemat runs two separate programs on the same sand. One is the sargassum operation, the haul that everyone sees. The other exists for the certification.

That second program covers general and marine litter, microplastics, glass, cigarette ends, and the small debris that has to be worked out of the sand by hand, along with the job of protecting the dunes and the vegetation holding them. "That constant work is what made the audit go well, and why we have good comments on what they came to check," Buchanan García said.

He also asked residents and visitors to leave with what they brought in. There are separation stations on the beaches, he said, and there are still coolers and bags that stay behind.

"We are not against people going, bringing a cooler, bringing their things. But we do ask that when they leave, they pick up their trash, because that trash did not get there on its own," he said.

Occupancy near 20 percent on the same coast

The audit landed in what the hotels have stopped calling a season. On the same day Buchanan García set out the certification process, the president of the Asociación de Hoteles de Tulum, David Ortiz Mena, said it is not viable for coastal hotels to open only in the months without sargassum, because the seaweed now reaches the Mexican Caribbean for eight or nine months of the year. He described the problem as structural rather than seasonal, and warned that normalizing temporary closures would cost permanent jobs.

Ortiz Mena put occupancy on the Tulum coast at around 20 percent at European-plan hotels and around 40 percent at all-inclusive properties. Some hotels spend several million pesos a month on beach cleaning during peak arrivals, he said, in some cases more than double what they spend on electricity. No consolidated figure for the losses exists yet, which is the measurement he is asking the public and private sectors to fund. Our guide to the sargassum season tracks how the arrivals move month by month.

Both accounts are true at once. The certificate grades what the town and its visitors leave on the sand. It does not grade what the current brings in.

Los Cabos may deliver the Tulum beach certification in October

Buchanan García said the handover could happen in Los Cabos during October, without treating that as settled either. The scheme works that way, gathering municipalities at a national meeting and handing out the documents there. Last year's fifth Encuentro de Playas Sustentables was held in Quintana Roo, and Los Cabos alone left it with 22 Playa Platino certificates. That destination was the first in the country to obtain one, in 2020.

None of it settles anything for Conchita and Del Pueblo. The evaluator's comments are not the result, and the result is not the certificate. Tulum finds out on paper in October.

Have you spent a day at Playa Conchita or Playa del Pueblo this summer, and how did you find the sand? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes .