For instance, Hall and Page note that, "The recreational business district is the seasonally oriented linear aggregation of restaurants, various specialty food stands, candy stores and a varied array of novelty and souvenir shops which cater to visitors' leisurely shopping needs" (289). In Cancun, there has been a thoughtful spatial differentiation made between the recreational business district and those other districts in the city that are devoted exclusively to tourist accommodations in order to better management tourism development (Hall and Page 289)
According to Jafari (2000), "The prime example of this type of development is Cancun (a hand-picked location built into a resort city from the ground up) that grew from 300 inhabitants in 1974 to more than 250,000 in 1995" (389). This author also notes that Cancun's beginnings in the early 1970s represented an initiative by the Mexican government to encourage economic development in the economically depressed Yucatan peninsula; the success of this venture has resulted in the Cancun model of developing physical geographic spaces being used in other locations around the world (Jafari 503)
Rocks make plowing difficult, and irrigation ditches are impossible to construct because the porous soil cannot hold moisture" (23). Based on hydrologic investigations to determine whether groundwater could have satisfied the domestic and agricultural needs of the early Mayan inhabitants, though, it was found that although the region's groundwater is located near the surface and is influenced by sea-level fluctuations and geochemical analyses determined that the quality of the groundwater is not adversely affected by contamination with seawater (Luzzadder-Beach 493)
Because of limited surface-water resources, groundwater must have played as critical a role in ancient domestic, economic, and social life as it does today" (Luzzadder-Beach 494). In sharp contrast to the coastal region where Cancun is situated, the center of the Yucatan Peninsula enjoys a wetter and more fertile environment, causing some anthropologists to speculate on the failure of the ancient Mayans to relocate there rather than perish mysteriously altogether (Mann 2006:505)