A decade after becoming a municipality, Puerto Morelos reports its biggest year of public works

In January, Puerto Morelos marked ten years as a municipality of its own, after eight decades of being governed from somewhere else. On September 11, standing in the town's Parque Fundadores, its mayor reported the largest year of public works in that decade, and the more telling figure sat underneath it: a municipal budget that, on the council's own numbers, has roughly doubled since 2021 while carrying no public debt.

Mayor Blanca Merari Tziu Muñoz delivered her second annual report at the sixth solemn session of the council, under the banner "A diez años, contigo hoy damos resultados", or "Ten years on, with you, today we deliver results". The state governor, Mara Lezama Espinosa, sat in the front row alongside representatives of the state congress and the state high court. The headline figure was more than 126 million pesos spent on infrastructure and services during 2026, which the administration describes as the largest in the municipality's ten years. That figure, like every figure in the report, is the municipality's own account of itself.

A port that was always run from elsewhere

The decade matters because of how long the wait was. According to INAFED, the federal institute for municipal development, Puerto Morelos began on February 29, 1936, when 51 residents founded an ejido on a strip of coast that held little more than wooden houses, a dock, a lighthouse and a single street along the sea. Over the following eighty years the town was administered in turn from Isla Mujeres, from Cozumel and finally from Benito Juárez, the municipality whose seat is Cancún. Decisions about its streets, its beach and its budget were taken in a city hall up the highway in Cancún.

That changed with Decree 342 of the Quintana Roo congress, published on November 6, 2015 and in force from January 6, 2016. Puerto Morelos became the state's eleventh municipality, and it is still the youngest. Its territory runs to 1,043.92 square kilometers and takes in far more than the beach town most visitors know: Leona Vicario and Central Vallarta inland, the colonia on the west side of the highway, and a long stretch of jungle between them.

The sea in front of the town was protected before the town governed itself. The Parque Nacional Arrecife de Puerto Morelos was decreed on February 2, 1998, covering 9,066 hectares of reef and lagoon, when the coast still belonged to Benito Juárez. The best known landmark in town is older still. The lighthouse built in 1946 lost its footing to Hurricane Beulah in September 1967 and has leaned on the beach ever since, with its working replacement standing upright behind it. An attempt to right it failed, so it was left as it stood, and it became the town's symbol.

What the tenth year reported

The money is the part of the report that describes the decade best. The mayor said the municipality has gone from a budget of a little over 400 million pesos in 2021 to a revenue law of 828 million pesos for 2026, and expects to close the year at around 900 million. More than six of every ten pesos it administers, she said, now come from its own revenue rather than from state and federal transfers, and Puerto Morelos carries zero public debt. For a municipality that did not exist before 2016, that is the clearest measure in the report of what separating from Cancún has come to.

The state government contributed 45 million pesos to the year's works, according to La Opinión de Quintana Roo's account of the session. The named projects are practical rather than grand. The street lighting along Federal Highway 307, the road that runs past the town and ties it to the rest of the Riviera Maya, has been rebuilt with 414 new luminaires at a cost of 20 million pesos. A first phase of a new public security complex, another 20 million pesos, came from state funds. Street works were reported in the La Fe and Tierra Nueva neighborhoods.

On security, the council reported 15 new patrol vehicles bought for 14.9 million pesos, bringing the fleet to 63 units for a force of 91 officers, and a new tourist proximity police unit working the town on four electric bicycles and two RZR utility vehicles. On the beach, 6,412 tonnes of sargassum were removed during the year at a cost of 11.8 million pesos, behind 2.3 kilometers of barrier, the same barrier whose planned expansion we covered in June. The social ledger included 500 women receiving a monthly payment of 1,300 pesos, close to 20,000 people seen in municipal clinics, and 1,221 homes in the pipeline under the federal Vivienda para el Bienestar program.

Tourism was reported at 940,148 visitors between October 2025 and September 2026, with 74 hotels and 8,450 rooms across the municipality. The administration also said it has met 30 of the 50 commitments it made on taking office in 2024.

What it does and does not prove

A municipal report is a claim of progress made by the people whose progress it is, delivered with the governor in the audience. It is not an audit, and it does not claim to be one. The visitor count covers a period that had not ended when it was announced, and outlets covering the session did not agree on every detail, including the size of the camera network, which is why that figure is left out here. The budget comparison is in pesos of different years and says nothing about inflation. Nor does a single strong year show what the next administration will do with the same revenue.

What the report does establish is direction. Ten years ago Puerto Morelos had no council, no budget and no say over the highway lighting outside its own front door. It now reports its own revenue, its own debt position and a list of works it can name street by street. For a small reef town, that is the substance of the decade, and it is why the next report will be read against this one.

For anyone weighing a home here, the questions that follow price are usually about lighting, roads, security and whether the beach is looked after, and they can now be set against the municipality's own published figures. For more on the town, see our guide to Puerto Morelos and our earlier report on the Puerto Morelos sargassum barrier.

Sources: Second Informe de Gobierno of Blanca Merari Tziu Muñoz, VI Sesión Solemne de Cabildo, Parque Fundadores, Puerto Morelos, September 11, 2026, as reported by Novedades Quintana Roo (September 11, 2026), 5to Poder (September 11, 2026), La Opinión de Quintana Roo (September 12, 2026), El Sureste (September 12, 2026) and Quintana Roo Hoy (September 12, 2026), and the H. Ayuntamiento de Puerto Morelos release "A diez años, contigo hoy damos resultados" (September 2026); INAFED, "Puerto Morelos es el municipio de más reciente creación del estado de Quintana Roo" (January 22, 2018); CONANP, decree establishing the Parque Nacional Arrecife de Puerto Morelos (February 2, 1998).

Main image: the leaning lighthouse of Puerto Morelos, with its working replacement behind it. Photo: Aussie Assault, CC BY 2.0.