![]() ![]() The seaweed was a problem elsewhere in the Caribbean, but for Tulum, which presented on Instagram as a perfect paradise, the threat was existential. Right before Christmas, the receptionist at one hotel apologized to a guest about the seaweed by responding, “I can say with much joy that we have built a very nice swimming pool.” Tulum was busier than ever, but some hotels were reporting cancellations and disappointed customers. Rooms at Be Tulum were going for $2,000 a night, which, Barbachano noted, with a mixture of pride and bewilderment, was more than the Four Seasons in Paris. “That’s my biggest fucking enemy.” He was eating octopus tacos at Be Tulum, one of the poshest hotels on Tulum’s five-mile strip of beach. “Look at that black wave,” Eugenio Barbachano, Tulum’s director general of tourism, said one afternoon in January, staring at the brackish sea. But some residents of Tulum, which has long attracted visitors predisposed toward the mystical, thought that Mother Nature had simply had enough: The first time one local remembered seeing the seaweed was after one of Tulum’s many oceanfront venues hosted a wild party and put up a barrier to close off the beach. Where was it coming from? Development in the Amazon was leaching more fertilizer into increasingly warmer oceans - maybe that was it. Dead fish and other sea creatures were mixed in, and the piles on the beach smelled like rotten eggs. Some of the seaweed was puke brown, while the rest was dark red, and in the summer it was so thick that swimming was impossible. They came from deep in the Atlantic and across the Caribbean, darkening the neon-blue water. The walls of seaweed first started washing over the white-sand beaches of Tulum, Mexico, in 2015.
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