Playa Norte

Playa Norte wraps around the northern end of the island, about 10 km across the Bahia de Mujeres from Cancun's ferry pier at Puerto Juarez. It faces the mainland, which shields it from the strong easterly trade winds and open ocean swell that hit the island's Caribbean side. For that reason the water is described as unusually calm and shallow. Guides say visitors can wade out a long way and remain waist deep, with estimates ranging from over 100 meters to about 200 meters.

The beach is wide, with one guide giving about 100 meters of sand, and it is within a short walk of the ferry dock, roughly 0.9 km or 11 minutes. Wikipedia notes the beach recovered quickly after Hurricane Wilma struck the area in 2005. On clear days the Cancun skyline can be seen across the water to the west.

Isla Mujeres means Island of Women. Wikipedia says that before the Spanish arrived the island was sacred to Ixchel, the Maya goddess of childbirth and medicine, and that the Spanish, arriving in the sixteenth century, named it after the many goddess images found there. One source credits Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba with the naming in 1517. The earliest record Wikipedia cites places the island in the Maya province of Ekab, and says the Maya harvested salt from interior lagoons for food preservation, medicine and as a form of currency.

Local tradition holds that the island was a stopover for pirates, though Wikipedia's dating of this is unclear. It also relates the story of Hernan Mundaca, who built a large hacienda on the island hoping to win a local woman, Martiniana Gomez Pantoja, who married someone else. This tale is repeated in guidebooks but Wikipedia marks it as needing a citation, so it is best treated as local lore rather than documented history.

The island is about 7 km long and 0.65 km wide, and its town had 12,642 residents in the 2010 census. Wikipedia says tourism development began in the 1970s alongside nearby Cancun. Getting around is done by taxi, golf cart and moped, and the article counts 121 taxis, 500 golf carts and 1,500 mopeds in 2005. The west coast falls within the Costa Occidental de Isla Mujeres National Park, and an underwater museum of sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor lies off that coast.

Playa Norte has appeared repeatedly on Tripadvisor's lists of top beaches. A 2014 post by a resort company says it ranked among the world's top ten beaches that year in Tripadvisor members' voting and first among Mexico's beaches. Such rankings are travel-industry reputation, not official awards, and they change from year to year, so they are best read as popularity rather than a measured ranking.

Sargassum seaweed is generally described as rare at Playa Norte, though one source reports a short-lived surge reaching it for a day in March 2026. Catamaran tours from Cancun tend to arrive around midday, so early hours are typically quieter. Most visitors reach Isla Mujeres by ferry from Puerto Juarez or Punta Sam in Cancun. A private guided visit can arrange the transfer to the ferry and combine the beach with the island's other sights, such as Punta Sur and the downtown streets.