Five stops in an hour on foot, from the pier to Avenida Juárez. The ones that closed, the ones that changed names, and the two that have been open for half a century.
You can walk Playa del Carmen north to south in about an hour. Along that stretch stood nearly every hotel that made the town: the ones that opened when this was a stopover, the ones that changed names and are still running, and the ones that are gone.
This is a walk past those places, south to north, starting at the pier.
Fifth Avenue at Calle 1 Sur.
The Hotel Molcas stood here, two floors and 26 rooms, open since the 1970s. It closed in 2015.
Its business explains what Playa was like then. The Cozumel ferry ran three times a day. Anyone who arrived late or missed the last crossing was stuck, and the Molcas was right there to take them in. It did not live off beach tourism. It lived off the boat schedule.
Today the ferry runs hourly and nobody gets stuck. That change, more than any other, is why Playa stopped being a place you passed through.
Playacar Palace, Playacar Phase I.
What now operates as Playacar Palace opened as the Continental Plaza and was one of the first three hotels in Playacar. Semarnat records put it at 350 rooms in 1994.
That is the scale that changed the town. One hotel with 350 rooms, back when all of Playa held a few thousand people.
Palace Resorts bought it in 2004. If you want the story of how that whole development was built, we cover it separately in our piece on Playacar.
Calle 12, right on the beach.
The Blue Parrot opened in 1984 and was the beach bar of backpacker Playa: sand floor, wooden chairs, live music, and people who had come to dive Cozumel and stayed here instead.
Over time it became a stop on the international electronic music circuit. It closed in 2017 after an act of violence, and the era of big festivals in town closed with it.
It is the only stop on this walk with no successor. The building changed. The name did not come back.
Calle 38, right on the beach.
The Shangri-La Caribe started somewhere between 1982 and 1985, depending on the source, with palapas and no electricity facing the sea. No air conditioning, no television, no wiring.
It now runs as Mahekal Beach Resort, and the interesting part is that it kept the idea: beachfront bungalows instead of a tower. It is one of the few places on the Riviera Maya where the original shape survived the rebrand.
Avenida Juárez, a few blocks off the beach.
Hotel Playa del Carmen opened in 1970. Posada Lily dates from the same period. Both are still running.
No infinity pool, no chef's restaurant. They have what they always had: simple rooms on the street that connects the town to the highway. That they are still there, fifty years on and surrounded by everything else, is the most interesting part of this walk.
Akumal, 38 kilometers from the pier. Hotel Club Akumal Caribe began as the base for the divers of CEDAM, the club run by Pablo Bush Romero that recovered shipwrecks along this coast from the 1950s on. It is still in the Bush family. It is the oldest hotel on the corridor that kept its original line, and it sits right where the turtle snorkeling happens.
Puerto Aventuras, 22 kilometers from the pier. What is now the Puerto Aventuras Hotel & Beach Club opened in December 1997 as a thirty-room Omni. Thirty. In the same development that today has a marina, a golf course and more than twenty thousand residents.
| Stop | Where | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fifth Avenue at Calle 1 Sur | Hotel Molcas, 1970s to 2015 |
| 2 | Playacar Phase I, by the pier | Continental Plaza, now Playacar Palace |
| 3 | Calle 12, on the beach | Blue Parrot, 1984 to 2017 |
| 4 | Calle 38, on the beach | Shangri-La Caribe, now Mahekal |
| 5 | Avenida Juárez | Hotel Playa del Carmen and Posada Lily, open |
The five stops take a long hour on foot, with the sea in view most of the way.
Playa del Carmen did not grow by replacing what was there. It grew alongside it.
The seventies hotels are still on Juárez, three blocks from the Playacar resorts. The eighties palapas became five-star bungalows without changing shape. And the hotel that lived off stranded ferry passengers closed when the boat started running hourly, not because anyone tore it down.
The only thing that disappeared outright was the Blue Parrot, and what went with it was not a building. It was a way of coming to Playa.
Several of these hotels are still open and bookable. In our hotels section we publish rates and what a night on the Riviera Maya actually costs.
Opening, closing and rebranding dates come from official records, Mexican press and the operators themselves. Where sources give different years, we say so.
If you want to follow the thread, Playacar tells how the development that brought the big hotels went up, and who built Playa del Carmen tells where the people who made them run came from.
Did you work at any of these hotels, or do you have photos from those years? Write to us: vive@ventasplaya.com
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