Costa Mujeres

Costa Mujeres is the name given to the mainland coast of Isla Mujeres municipality, the long, low beach that runs north from Punta Sam toward Isla Blanca, roughly 20 minutes by road north of Cancún. It looks across a shallow channel at Isla Mujeres and is lined by Boulevard Costa Mujeres. Playa Mujeres, a gated development with condominiums, hotels and a golf course, sits at its southern end. INEGI also lists a tiny locality called Costa Mujeres just south of Punta Sam; it had six residents in 2010 and was recorded as uninhabited in the 2020 census.

Until the mid-2010s this was mostly empty scrub, dunes and beach with a single condo and hotel complex. As Cancún's hotel zone ran out of room, hotel chains bought land here: Riu opened the Riu Dunamar in December 2017, the first hotel on the strip, and Palladium opened its Grand Palladium and TRS resorts with 1,146 rooms in November 2018. Meliá, AMResorts, Atelier, Excellence and others followed, and by 2019 the mainland zone was the fastest-growing hotel area in the state. In January 2026 the municipality reported hotel occupancy of 85 percent here.

Today Costa Mujeres is resort country: big all-inclusive hotels set behind wide, flat beaches of pale sand, with a golf course designed by Greg Norman at Playa Mujeres. It is calmer than Cancún's hotel zone, with no town centre of its own, and most visitors stay inside the resorts or go out on tours. Cancún city, the ferries to Isla Mujeres at Puerto Juárez and Punta Sam, and the Maya site of El Meco are all a short drive south.