Tulum’s 6,000 turtle nests hatch after dark, onto whatever the beach clubs left out

Sea turtle nesting in Tulum has produced more than 6,000 nests this season, and the volunteers who count them say the furniture left on the sand overnight is still in the way.

The figure comes from the turtle camp at Punta Piedra, whose patrols run south from that beach to Playa Maya Tulum. Monitoring started in April. The official season opened on May 3, and the camp expects to keep working until the end of November, the volunteers told La Jornada Maya.

That leaves roughly six weeks of hatchings. Every one of them happens after dark, and the volunteers say the same obstacle has held all season: sunbeds, umbrellas and other furniture that beachfront businesses leave out when the day ends.

Green turtles lead this season's sea turtle nesting in Tulum

The Punta Piedra volunteers put the green turtle, Chelonia mydas, at the top of the count, with the loggerhead, Caretta caretta, second. Leatherback nests (Dermochelys coriacea) have not appeared this year.

That order tracks what the municipality recorded when the previous season closed. Figures published in December citing the Dirección de Sustentabilidad Ambiental listed 15,848 green turtle nests, 2,309 loggerhead nests and three hawksbill nests for 2025, with 1,085,347 hatchlings released. Those totals cover every authorized camp on the municipal coast, which is why they sit far above one camp's running count.

The missing leatherback is less of a break than it sounds. The 2025 municipal breakdown did not list the species either, although leatherback hatchlings have been released in Tulum in earlier seasons.

The permits put the deadline at 7 p.m.

What the volunteers are asking for is already included in the paperwork that allows beachfront businesses to operate.

Environmental conditions attached by Tulum's Dirección de Sustentabilidad Ambiental to coastal operations in recent seasons set the official protection period from May 1 to November 30 and require that, from 7 p.m., any movable object capable of trapping, entangling or blocking the passage of nesting females and hatchlings be removed from the beach.

The same documents reach past the loungers. Any fixture that casts light or glare toward the nesting beach at night must be eliminated, reoriented, or modified. Where lighting stays, the condition allows low-voltage bulbs of up to 40 watts in yellow or red, aimed inland. Dogs and cats are kept off the sand under NOM-162-SEMARNAT-2012, which restricts domestic animals on nesting beaches because they can disturb or injure females and hatchlings. Vehicles are limited to monitoring work, and noise directed at the beach is capped under NOM-081-SEMARNAT-1994.

Every sea turtle species in Mexican waters is listed as endangered under NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010.

How consistently the furniture rule is kept is a separate question, and one the camps have raised before. The Grupo Tortuguero del Caribe, citing 2023 state figures of 11,331 nests and more than 1.2 million hatchlings, has estimated through its biologist Gisela Maldonado Saldaña that as many as 90 percent of hotels along the Quintana Roo coast fail to comply with the ban on leaving sunbeds and umbrellas where they obstruct nesting turtles. That estimate covers the state coastline, not Tulum specifically.

Dogs and wild predators took few nests this season; the furniture stayed

Predation has been the good news. The volunteers reported a low incidence of nests lost to wild animals and to dogs, which they say has allowed the protection work to move forward.

The contrast is worth sitting with, because predation is the threat a camp can act on directly. A nest can be relocated, caged, marked, watched. A row of loungers left out after closing sits on the one part of the beach the camp does not control.

Disorientation is the risk the camp's name

Objects on the sand interfere at both ends of the cycle, according to the volunteers. Adult females coming ashore to dig have to get around them. Hatchlings emerging weeks later need a clear line to the water, and anything in their path increases the chance they turn the wrong way and never reach it.

Sargassum has been doing similar damage elsewhere on the coast this year. The Quintana Roo environment secretariat's tally, cited in late August, put statewide collection at 114,071 tons. In Mahahual, Víctor Rosales of the civil association Proyecto Aak said the accumulated algae and beach erosion had pushed loggerheads onto rocky beaches and, in documented cases, led females to release their eggs in the water. The Tulum camp did not raise sargassum. It named the furniture.

This publication reported in May that the municipality confirmed the season's first nest with seven protection programs active, and that conservation teams were already flagging artificial light and night-time presence on the beach as the two pressures they expected to fight all season.

Six weeks left on the sand

The camp's request to hoteliers, service providers and visitors is narrow. Take the sunbeds and umbrellas off the beach when the day's activities end. Keep waste from accumulating. Leave the marked nesting areas alone.

Municipal environmental authorities have said seven authorized camps work the Tulum coast under a municipal turtle protection committee. The one at Punta Piedra covers a stretch that includes both the public beach and the hotel frontage, which is where the furniture question actually lives.

Monitoring between Punta Piedra and Playa Maya Tulum runs until the end of November. Every nest still buried on that stretch will open after dark, and the route those hatchlings find will have been settled hours earlier, by whoever decided what to leave standing on the sand.

Have you seen sunbeds and umbrellas left out overnight on Tulum's beaches this season? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.