Places · Cancún
Parque de las Palapas: the town square Cancún invented for itself
The city planned at a desk was never drawn a main square. Its first inhabitants built one anyway, roofed with palm, in 1974 — and half a century later it is still the only place where Cancún looks like itself.
Every Mexican city organises itself around its plaza: the zócalo, the cathedral, the arcades. Not Cancún — because Cancún didn't grow, it was decreed. In the late sixties the federal government chose this nearly uninhabited strip of jungle and dunes to manufacture, from scratch, the great resort destination of the Mexican Caribbean, and in 1970 the people who would build it began to arrive. The master plan came with hotels, boulevards and superblocks. It did not come with a town square.
The inhabitants invented one. In 1974 — the same year Quintana Roo stopped being a territory and became a state — the central park of the newborn downtown was created: a project by architect Miguel Valverde, with terraced levels, planters and concrete benches surrounding a small plaza with a stage. And instead of a wrought-iron bandstand, what rose was the only thing that made sense to raise in this corner of the world: palapas, the palm roofs of the peninsula's Maya architecture, built by palapero Isauro Kanxoc. The official name is Parque de las Palapas, but the city says it short: las Palapas.
The square that actually works as a square
Half a century on, las Palapas does everything a zócalo should. By day it is a neighbourhood park: playgrounds, ice cream, palapa shade against the heat. By night it lights up like an old-fashioned public square — performances on the stage, live music, group sessions for learning salsa and danzón, fairs and community events programmed by the Instituto de la Cultura y las Artes. All around, the perimeter is a permanent antojitos fair: marquesitas — the Yucatecan crepe filled with Dutch cheese — esquites, tamales, empanadas and fruit waters that make dinner at las Palapas its own genre of Cancún night out.
The other Cancún
Here is the charm and the paradox: in Mexico's most touristic city, this is the place with almost no tourists. Las Palapas sits downtown, half an hour and a world away from the hotel zone; a few blocks off is Mercado 23, the city's old market, and even city hall's free community bike rides depart from its esplanade. The smarter food tours already include it as 'the true heart of Cancún', and guides describe it as the city's little Alameda. The current municipal administration has been renovating it — green areas, furniture, recreational spaces — because it knows what it has: the only piece of Cancún designed for no one but the people who live here.
Why it matters
Las Palapas is proof that a public square cannot be decreed: it has to be earned. The city invented for other people's rest needed only four years to build itself a palm-roofed heart, and fifty to fill it every night. If you want to understand what Cancún is when nobody is watching — start here, marquesita in hand, on any given Tuesday.
The events of this square and of the rest of the city will keep appearing on this platform. See you under the palapas. no te limites.
This is NTL Magazine: opinionated picks about real events from the catalog. Nothing sponsored, nothing made up. If a detail changed, drop a line to hola@notelimites.com.