What happened to Tulum has happened before
Photo: Sam Youkilis The walls of seaweed first started washing over the white-sand beaches of Tulum, Mexico, in 2015. They came from deep in the Atlantic and across the Caribbean, darkening the neon-blue water. Some of the seaweed was puke brown, while the rest was dark red, and in the summer it was so thick that swimming was impossible. Dead fish and other sea creatures were mixed in, and the piles on the beach smelled like rotten eggs.
In barely more than a decade, Tulum transformed from a backpacker’s beach into the next stop after Ibiza on the global DJ party circuit. It now has 40,000 residents, with 200,000 expected by 2030, and the town hasn’t been able to keep up with the arrival of wealthy jet-setters and the people who follow them on social media. There is no electricity on the beach, so diesel generators groan all day and night to run the air conditioners that customers demand.
Tulum, meanwhile, was little more than a truck stop a few hours south, with a Mayan fortress on the beach where tour buses disgorged visitors for an afternoon. Unless you were looking to get off the grid, there wasn’t much reason to stay. Beachfront hammocks went for $10 a night, or you could sleep at the ruins, under the stars.
Gardner told me to come back on Friday, Gitano’s biggest night of the week. I found him surveying the scene from his table. “Isn’t it glamorous?” he said, gesturing toward the sequined booty shorts on the hips of the night’s DJ, who didn’t blink. Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes, was at the table, as was “some kind of Belgian aristocrat” with long blond hair and a lip ring. The Belgian was leaning back with his leg, in a cast, on the table. “He didn’t have a cast last night,” Gardner said.
Perlman’s interest in Gitano wasn’t in curating a vibe. “Before I came in, it was a beautiful place,” she said. “Now it’s a business.” Perlman owns not only the land under Gitano and half of the business but also the land under Casa Pueblo, and she is soon to open a new restaurant with Klein just a few doors down from Gitano. “Derek said, ‘Please buy me out,’ ” Perlman said. “So I did. And now I’m opening another place with Derek.” She smiled.
If you were here in 2017, you’d have seen a Noma pop-up with dinner for $600 plus tax, but don’t worry if you weren’t; one of the chefs stuck around to open a spot that is “Tulum’s only restaurant with an immersion circulator and sous vide technology.
Palazuelos dealt with several claims to his properties, fighting off one challenge thanks to his father, a prominent Mexico City lawyer, who was himself the son of a former judge. But in 2014, the Schiavones, a wealthy family from Monterrey, said they owned the land under Ahau. Palazuelos says he eventually came to believe the Schiavones’ claim and agreed to buy the land from them at a discounted rate of $250 per square meter.
Eugenio Barbachano and Mr. Tulum. Photo: Sam Youkilis. Eugenio Barbachano and Mr. Tulum. Photo: Sam Youkilis. “We’re the biggest real-estate developers in Tulum,” Nico Wilmes told me at the four-story offices of Los Amigos Tulum. Before moving to Mexico, Wilmes was a competitive bodybuilder operating a cardboard-packaging company in Germany; he met Marc Levy, a construction manager from Arizona, while backpacking in Central America.
The rest of the jungle between the beach and the town is now a free-for-all. One afternoon, I had lunch with R. J. Thoman, a local real-estate agent better known as “Mr. Tulum,” a nickname he gave himself. Mr. Tulum moved to Mexico from Texas in 1990. He had tried to bring Church’s Chicken to Cancún, which didn’t work, then inflatable amusement games to Mexican malls, which somehow did. “Then I got a divorce,” Mr. Tulum said. “That ended that.
The activists from Red Tulum have made only fitful progress. The town shut down the recycling center in November because it was disrupting a government organization run by the mayor’s wife. Mauricio Jervis, a local chef who runs a composting service, managed to persuade only 30 of the hundreds of hotels and restaurants in Tulum to sign up, even though all it required was passing along an extra 25-cent charge to each customer.
Tulum is a transient boomtown, and even the Mexicans who live there come mostly from somewhere else for work. That has left only the committed group of activists trying to tackle various problems. But they are outnumbered, and no one is completely pure. Several people who criticized Los Amigos for “greenwashing” admitted to me that they belong to the well-air-conditioned Los Amigos gym. Self-described hippies have investment properties.
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