Road bridge will connect the Jaguar National Park in Tulum

The head of Sedatu toured the nature reserve to supervise the construction work. During President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s tour of the area, the head of the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu), Román Meyer Falcón, announced that a road bridge will be built to connect the nature reserve.

Meyer Falcón said: “We are contemplating a bridge that will free the road crossing, but it will be a bridge designed for electric transportation”, while detailing that the park will have three accesses: north, central and south.

“We started (the tour) in the southern part, we saw the progress of that access. We are going to have three accesses in total. In the whole park what we have found is a disorder, since the 80’s there is a group of hotels and constructions that today are operating. So we are looking to distribute everything in two main accesses: the south (which is 10 percent advanced in the foundation process) and the central access (located on Cobá Avenue), which will be another main access where we will have parking lots to receive the greatest flow of visitors from Tulum, Quintana Roo and other entities,” the official explained.

Regarding the third access, he indicated that it will consist of building a bridge that will comply with all the guidelines of the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SCT), but it will be an infrastructure that will only be used for an electric mobility transport that will run along the park’s circuit, which is still in a conceptual process to determine the best connection point, which will be on federal highway 307, on the Tulum-Playa del Carmen stretch.

He said that it must be remembered that the circuit will allow a very restricted access to the hotels that have loading and unloading of food, articles, services, etc., which will be done at night and in the early morning, but that the operation during the day will be through an electric mobility system from the southern part to the central part, with connection to the Tren Maya terminal.

The reordering of this natural reserve involves the beach area of the national park, the opening of three more public accesses to the sea, the relocation of 170 tourist services, new infrastructure, modifications to mobility, and the closing of irregular construction sites. The work is projected to be completed by the end of this year.

The first stage, which consisted of the construction of a 21-kilometer perimeter fence and the bicycle lane on Cobá Avenue, with an investment of almost 96 million pesos, is practically finished, after work began in early September 2022.

Currently, work is focused on the southern entrance, which borders the Tulum-Boca Paila highway and leads to the coastal area of Tulum. From the public road it can be seen that what used to be the traffic circle known as the “T” has already been removed for this work.

Meyer Falcón responds to dissatisfaction with the changes

In response to the controversy and discomfort generated among merchants and visitors due to the entrance restrictions and lack of parking spaces on the beaches of Tulum National Park, the head of Sedatu emphasized that they are seeking order and in the process there are changes, but that at the end of the infrastructure works there will be spaces for visitors, tourist systems and transportation.

He pointed out that it was well known to everyone that there was chaos in this Natural Protected Area, where there was no security when vehicles carrying construction materials were allowed to pass, and that the work was still going on until two months ago.

He specified that he himself found constructions still operating in the process of foundations and structures without permits, which is why the National Guard is currently restricting the passage of this type of illegal passage within the park, which is part of the management process.

“At the end of the conformation of this infrastructure of the Jaguar National Park, what corresponds to the parking lot will be contemplated in the central zone of the park, that is where we will have the parking capacity for visitors, tourist systems and in the outer part of the south zone we will have space for transportation, there has also been a dialogue with the cab drivers of Tulum so that they contemplate that no economic source of their activities will be taken away, they will only be ordered, as with the whole issue of commercial establishments that we have on the beaches,” he stressed.

Meyer Falcón discarded the privatization of the beaches: “On the contrary, they are not going to be privatized, we are going to stop privatization because what has been done since the 80’s was to privatize the national park, as was done in many beaches in the country”.

Visits to two temples will be opened in Tulum

On the other hand, the interviewee added that in his tour this weekend he headed a tour to the back of the archaeological zone of Tulum, where they are contemplating to enable roads that lead to the visit and admiration of two temples that are no more than a kilometer away from the monuments zone.

“We are going to expand the tourist offer and archaeological tours in the monuments area so that tourists can access and have a notion of the two temples that today are not visited, but it is important to add them as an attraction,” said Meyer Falcón.