Things to Do in Tulum

The reef is the Caribbean: warm at 26 to 30 °C, salty, and alive with fish, rays and turtles. It sits a few hundred metres offshore, so you either swim out with a guide or take a boat. It is also the swim most affected by weather and by sargassum in the warmer months.

The cenotes are groundwater at about 24 °C, fresh and glass-clear, and they are indoors in the sense that matters: no wind, no weed, no waves. The lagoons — Kaan Luum in the south, the Muyil system inside the reserve — are the third thing again: shallow, warm, and better for floating than for looking at anything.

If the sea is rough or weedy, the cenotes are unaffected. If you want animals rather than rock, the reef or Akumal. If you want to lie in warm water and do nothing, the lagoon.

Free: every beach in Mexico, by law, including the sand under the ruins. The town's own streets in the evening, where the food is a third of the beach-road price. The cycle path out to the Cobá road. The lagoon views from the Muyil boardwalk cost the price of the ticket and nothing more.

Not free, though often presented as such: a beach club, which charges a minimum consumption rather than an entry fee and expects it to be spent on drinks; the photograph in front of the sculpture on the beach road, which sits on private hotel land; and parking almost anywhere on the beach strip. The gap between the two lists is the whole reason the fee table on the homepage exists.

The town end wakes up around seven. Avenida Tulum and the streets behind it fill with taco stands, marquesita carts and small kitchens that were feeding the people who work on the beach road an hour earlier. This is the cheap, good, unglamorous version of eating here, and it runs until late.

The beach road is the other thing entirely: bars and restaurants that price in dollars, several of them genuinely excellent, most of them running on generators. What neither end has is a promenade or a night market of the kind other Mexican towns build their evenings around — Tulum's night is either a table or a dance floor.

One caveat worth knowing: the four kilometres between the two are unlit for most of their length, and taxis have no published tariff, so the fare home from the beach road at midnight is whatever is agreed at the kerb. Agree it before you get in, and carry cash.

Stargazing and the night sky

Away from the two lit strips the sky here is genuinely dark, and the beach south of the hotel zone is the easiest place to see it. Turtle nesting season complicates that: the national park asks visitors to keep torches and phone lights off the sand at night in the nesting months, because hatchlings navigate by the horizon and a white light sends them inland. If you want a night walk on the beach, that is the rule that matters.

Yoga studios and retreat centres run across both the beach road and the newer residential grids inland, from single drop-in classes to week-long programmes. Prices track the address rather than the teaching: the same class costs a fraction of the beach-road figure two kilometres away in La Veleta.

Temazcal — the pre-Hispanic sweat lodge — is offered by a range of operators, some of them working with Maya practitioners and some of them not. It is a genuine tradition and a physically demanding one: heat, steam, closed dark space and an hour or more inside. Anyone with a heart condition, high blood pressure or a pregnancy should not do it, and any operator who does not ask about those things before you book is not the operator to use.

What this site does not do is rank retreats or wellness centres — we do not visit them, and a rating we could not check would be worth nothing. What we can say is where the money goes: the fees page covers the things that have a published price, and everything on the beach road that does not is a negotiation.

Straightforward with small children: Nicte-Ha at Dos Ojos, Zacil-Ha on the Cobá road, Laguna Kaan Luum and the public beaches — all shallow, open to the sky, and short on stairs. Akumal is calm water but several operators set a minimum age, and the compulsory life jacket applies to everybody.

Harder than it looks: Cenote Calavera, which is a ladder and a jump rather than a swim; the walk in at the Tulum ruins, which is fifteen to twenty minutes in the open before you reach the first building; and Cobá on foot, which is several kilometres of forest track — though the pedalled tricycles solve exactly that.