The Riviera Maya runs along Quintana Roo's Caribbean coast, roughly 40 km inland, between Puerto Morelos in the north and Tulum in the south — a run of crescent-shaped white-sand beaches broken every 1 to 10 km by low rocky headlands. The name itself is fairly recent: until 1999 the area was known as the "Cancún–Tulum corridor," and today's branding, modeled on the Italian and French Rivieras, was pushed through by Miguel Ramón Martín Azueta, then municipal president of Solidaridad.
Offshore runs the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the second-longest continuous coral reef in the world, beginning near Cancún and stretching south into Guatemala. It's this reef that keeps the water calm and clear right up to the sand at beaches such as Playa Paraíso in Tulum.
Under the peninsula's porous limestone lies a network of flooded caves with few equals anywhere on Earth: the Yucatán Peninsula is thought to hold around 10,000 cenotes — natural sinkholes formed when a cave's limestone roof collapses and exposes the water table below. With no rivers or lakes on the surface, these pools were the ancient Maya's only source of fresh water, and several close to Tulum, including the Gran Cenote and the Dos Ojos system, are still open to visitors today. The Maya regarded cenotes as portals to Xibalba, the underworld, and the home of Chaac, the rain god; by 2008 more than 700 km of flooded passages had been mapped in the region, including two of the largest underwater cave systems on the planet, Sac Actun and Ox Bel Ha.
At the Riviera Maya's southern end, within Tulum municipality, the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve covers 5,280 km² of mangrove, wetland and reef — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 and a Ramsar wetland since 2003, still home to jaguars, pumas, tapirs and flamingos. The reserve holds around 23 known Maya archaeological sites, among them the ruins of Muyil, along with the remains of a Decauville narrow-gauge railway that ran from 1905 to 1932 hauling chicle.
Between those two ends sit the towns that give the region its shape: Playa del Carmen, a small fishing village of 17,621 people as recently as 1995 that had already passed 304,000 residents by 2020 — now the region's main hub, linked by ferry to Cozumel and built around Quinta Avenida, its pedestrian shopping street — by 2017 it was already drawing more than a million tourists a year, and the Calica cruise-ship terminal sits about 10 km south of downtown; quieter Puerto Morelos; Akumal, known for its sea turtles; and, further south, Tulum town, next to the only major Maya city fortified on a sea cliff, the Tulum archaeological site.
Average temperatures hold at 24–25°C year-round. The rainy season runs May through November, with coastal rainfall reaching 1,500 mm a year in places — the highest total anywhere on the Yucatán Peninsula — so December through April tends to be the drier stretch. The region's main gateway is Cancún International Airport, about 130 km from Tulum and 68 km from Playa del Carmen by road.
The region runs from Puerto Morelos in the north to Tulum in the south, taking in Playa del Carmen, Puerto Aventuras and Akumal, over roughly 40 km inland along the Quintana Roo coast.
The Yucatán Peninsula is thought to hold around 10,000 cenotes, many of them concentrated in the Riviera Maya; some of the most visited near Tulum are the Gran Cenote and the Dos Ojos system.
Yes — the reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, can be visited on authorized guided tours from Tulum, usually by boat through its coastal channels and lagoons.
December through April tends to be drier; the rainy season runs from May to November, with the heaviest rainfall in the warmer months.