Cancún has two histories: a 1,000-year-old Maya coast of navigation shrines and trading ports, and a city literally drawn on paper by government planners in 1970. Three days connect El Rey and San Miguelito to Isla Mujeres, Tulum and the Mercado 28 barrios.
Postclassic Maya settlement (1200–1500 AD) of 47 structures along two plazas and a ceremonial avenue. Named for a sculpted head found in the main temple, likely a solar deity. Open 08:00–17:00 daily; iguanas outnumber visitors.
INAH's museum holds the Woman of Las Palmas, a 10,000-year-old skeleton from a nearby cenote, plus finds from Chichén Itzá and Comalcalco. One ticket also opens San Miguelito, the ruined Maya settlement behind the building.
Two small 13th–15th century structures on the highest natural point of the Hotel Zone, once a navigation beacon for Maya canoe traders running the coast between Isla Mujeres and Cozumel. Now hemmed in by the Park Royal and Westin grounds.
The largest ruin in the Cancún municipality, occupied from 250 AD and expanded around 1200 as a port controlling the Isla Mujeres crossing. El Castillo rises 12 metres with serpent-head sculptures at its base; open 08:00–17:00.
The Maya shrine to Ixchel, goddess of the moon and childbirth, that gave the island its name — Spaniards landing in 1517 found female figurines here. Hurricane Gilbert wrecked it in 1988; the surviving base marks Mexico's easternmost point.
Ruined 1860s estate of Fermín Mundaca, a Basque slave trader turned planter who built it to court a local woman known as La Trigueña. She married someone else; his gateway arch and gravestone with a carved skull remain.
The heart of the original planned city: FONATUR's 1970 masterplan divided Cancún into numbered supermanzanas, and SM22 housed the first construction workers. Las Palapas remains the plaza where the founding families still gather nightly.
A sequence of bronze busts and plaques along the Hotel Zone boulevard tracing Mexican independence, the 1910 revolution and the Maya past — installed as the resort city, with no colonial centre of its own, assembled a symbolic history.
The only walled Maya city on the Caribbean, a 13th–15th century port that traded obsidian and jade. Juan de Grijalva's crew sighted it in 1518 and compared it to Seville. El Castillo doubled as a lighthouse guiding canoes through the reef gap.
One of the plain concrete parish churches built in Cancún's inland 'Regiones' during the 1980s, when Maya families from Yucatán villages migrated for hotel work. The neighbourhoods, unlike the numbered supermanzanas, grew unplanned.
Opened in 1979 in SM23 as the young city's first cultural institution, it hosts the municipal archive's photo exhibitions of Cancún's 1970s construction — dirt airstrips, tent camps and the first bridge to the island.
Before Cancún existed, Puerto Juárez was a fishing hamlet of about 120 people and the only settlement here — the point where surveyors landed in 1969. The working pier still runs the island crossing that predates the resort by decades.