Cancún: Maya ruins and the Hotel Zone

The ruins of El Rey, within Cancún's Hotel Zone itself between one resort and another, preserve a small necropolis and a Maya temple dating to the postclassic period, today frequented also by iguanas basking undisturbed on the stones.

The Mercado 28, in the downtown city far from the Hotel Zone, sells Mexican crafts, fabrics, and chiles at prices far removed from those charged near the hotels.

The beach of Playa Delfines, among the few with free public access along the Hotel Zone, offers one of the best vantage points over the long strip of sand and the sign with the city's name, become in recent years an almost mandatory photo point.

The Cancún Maya Museum displays artifacts from various Yucatán sites together with a section dedicated to relics from San Miguelito, preserved within the same museum complex.

The iguanas that bask among the ruins of El Rey today occupy a space contested for centuries between the Maya and, more recently, between the builders of the Hotel Zone.

Mercado 28, just kilometers away but a world apart from the resorts, reminds us that the real Cancún is the one living away from the beach, not the glossy one in travel brochures.