Who Killed Tulum?

Greed, gringos, diesel, drugs, shamans, seaweed, and a disco ball in the jungle.

- Reeves Wiedeman

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THE WALLS OF SEAWEED FIRSTstarted 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. Where was it coming from? Development in the Amazon was leaching more fertilizer into increasingly warmer oceans—maybe that was it. But some residents of Tulum, which has long attracted visitors predisposed toward the mystical, thought that Mother Nature had simply had enough: The first time one local remembered seeing the seaweed was after one of Tulum’s many oceanfront venues hosted a wild party and put up a barrier to close off the beach.

“Look at that black wave,” Eugenio Bar bachano, Tulum’s director general of tourism, said one afternoon in January, staring at the brackish sea. “That’s my biggest fucking enemy.” He was eating octopus tacos at Be Tulum, one of the poshest hotels on Tulum’s five-mile strip of beach. Rooms at Be Tulum were going for $2,000 a night, which, Barbachano noted, with a mixture of pride and bewilderment, was more than the Four Seasons in Paris. Tulum was busier than ever, but some hotels were reporting cancellations and disappointed customers. Right before Christmas, the receptionist at one hotel apologized to a guest about the seaweed by responding, “I can say with much joy that we have built a very nice swimming pool.”