This is how Cancun changed after it became a tourist destination

Two photos from the space of Cancun have gone viral and you can see the big difference between this tourist destination in the year 1985 and 2019. The Twitter account of @NasaEarth wrote a message from the images saying that it was once one of the poorest regions of Mexico and is now a large tourist city with millions of visitors every year.

According to a writing by Kasha Patel who has been a science writer and video producer at NASA's Earth Observatory since 2018, fifty years ago Cancun only had a population of about 100 people, but today it has become one of Mexico's top tourist attractions.

"The above pair of images shows the growth of Cancun between March 28, 1985, and April 11, 2019. The images were acquired by Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 5 and Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, respectively. In the late 1980s, the population of Cancún was about 120,000. A 2015 census report by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reported about 740,000 people. Most of the hotels are located in a 27 kilometer (17 miles) stretch of beach known as the Hotel Zone," Patel wrote.

However, she also criticized that tourism has had a major impact on the environment. He explained that one of the biggest problems is water pollution from hotel wastewater. She says in the paper that the amount of garbage produced has also increased significantly. In addition, hotel construction and human presence have threatened local reef and coral systems.