Chicxulub Puerto

Chicxulub Puerto is a seaside village on the Gulf of Mexico, a comisaría of Progreso municipality, about 8 km east of the port of Progreso and roughly 40 km north of Mérida. It is not the same place as Chicxulub Pueblo, the inland town of the same name about 20 km to the south. The name is Maya and is usually translated as 'devil's flea', from ch'ik (flea) and xulub (devil). The village has grown fast: 217 people lived here in 1900, 3,024 in 1980 and 7,591 at the 2020 census, many of them in beach houses strung along the shore road.

The village is known around the world for what lies beneath it. It sits near the centre of the Chicxulub crater, a buried impact structure about 180 km across that extends out under the sea, left when an asteroid roughly 10 km wide struck about 66 million years ago. That impact is linked to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. Nothing of the crater is visible at the surface, but the village has made the most of it: a monument in the main square marks the supposed point of impact, and dinosaur statues stand around the plaza and the seafront.

The village has a long history as a lookout post: in 1663 the governor Juan Francisco Esquivel y de la Rosa named Chicxulub and Chuburná coastal watch towns against pirates. Today it is a quiet beach town with a pier, a seafront with large colourful CHICXULUB letters, seafood restaurants and beach clubs, and it is far calmer than Progreso's malecón. Behind the village is mangrove and wetland; on an old abandoned road through it, the Sendero Jurásico opened in May 2022 with dinosaur replicas and audio explanations of the impact, and it had received more than 130,000 visitors by mid-2026. The Museo del Meteorito is a few minutes away on the Progreso malecón.