Riu Hotels & Resorts has been working on a new Cancun hotel for the last five years and it doesn’t look like this new build will continue.
Riu shuts down construction of Hotel Riviera Cancun
First, Riu has been working on this new build in Cancun for the last five years and received opposition during that time, too.
According to the article, the court said that Riu reneged on promises it made to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, which would have cost 60 million pesos (USD 2,860,050).
In addition to the earlier non-compliance, there was another issue regarding construction concerns over an adjoining mangrove forest.
Back to the wastewater treatment facility.
Per Mexico News Daily, “the judge also noted that Cancun’s three municipal wastewater treatment plants are at their limit and can’t handle the extra wastewater load the hotel would have generated, as determined by an environmental impact study the Environment Ministry did in 2015.”
This appears to go even further though as the intention, according to the National Tourism Promotion Fund, was to have a maximum of 15,000 hotel rooms on Boulevard Kukulcan and there are currently a total of 36,000 rooms. And…there’s also a $1B 3000-room project (on the books) called Grand Island Cancún, which could also be rejected.
Therefore, it is likely that there won’t be any new builds in the area and we’ll continue to see how this story unfolds.
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