Although Cancún itself only came into being in the 1970s, the Yucatán Peninsula where the resort town is located has an extensive pre-Hispanic history. By AD 550 great Maya city-states were established in southern Yucatán. Mayápan, the last of the great Maya capitals started to collapse in the mid-15th century. In the 1540s, Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo the Younger brought most of the peninsula under control. Maya lands were divided into large estates, where the natives were put to work as indentured servants.

In 1847 after centuries of oppression, the Maya rose up in a massive revolt, the beginning of the War of the Castes.

In 1901, after more than 50 years of sporadic, but often intense violence, a peace was reached; however, it would be another 30 years before the territory of Quintana Roo came under official government control. It wasn't until the development of Cancún that Quintana Roo achieved statehood.

In the late 1960s Isla Cancún was a sliver of sand visited only by local fisherfolk and a few gringo adventurers. When the Mexican government decided to develop a resort on the island, the channels separating it from the mainland coast were bridged. Next, a town sprang up (where Ciudad Cancún now stands) to house Isla Cancún's construction workers and their families.

A well-paved street bordered by wide sidewalks was run down the centre of the island. Many hectares of mangroves and scrub brush were ripped out, scores of gardens were planted, and 'a very towered land', as one 16th-century Spanish historian described this coast, acquired even more towers as multistory resorts went up.

When Cancún opened in 1974, the carefully developed island was promoted as a tropical paradise. Soon it began attracting snowbirds from Canada and wealthy beach bums from all over the world, particularly the USA and Europe. Remarkably, Quintana Roo didn't become a state until that same year. And it likely wouldn't have received statehood even then, except that the government and developers ambitiously planning Cancún agreed that the new resort town would be difficult to promote if it were situated in a region apparently unworthy of statehood.

Despite its inauspicious beginnings, Cancún has become one of the brightest spots on the international sun-seeker map, although many argue that high-level corruption, the drug trade, overdevelopment and the resultant environmental pressures have spoiled the place. It came to international attention in 2003 with the release of a movie, The Real Cancún, featuring the antics of the beach-bunny crowd, and again when it hosted a round of World Trade Organisation talks. In October 2005 Hurricane Wilma wreaked some serious havoc in the Cancún area. The hotels have been rebuilt, and the government invested nearly M$200 million to restore the beaches. But the sand is beginning to wash away again. So what has the government decided to do? To the dismay of many environmentalists, they are planning on excavating 5.6 million cubic meters of sand from around Cozumel and Isla Mujeres to rebuild the area's beaches.