American’s #1 Summer Destination: Spilled Milk #338

Why the Riviera Maya is still worth it. (Yes, even in summer.) Plus: great places to eat and stay while you're there.

According to a half dozen organizations from Trip Advisor all the way to CNBC and PR Newswire, Cancún (the jumping off point for the Riviera Maya) is the #1 summer destination for American travelers. Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, the ancient ruins, the ocean, the cenotes all add up to a great time. But let’s be clear: the Riviera Maya in summer is also humid, crowded and about as subtle as a foam party at Señor Frog’s. It’s also ringed by all-inclusive resorts that promise “authenticity” but serve watered-down margaritas and mashed potatoes under heat lamps. It’s a region so overexposed that your least adventurous cousin has a selfie he took in Tulum wearing a teeny fedora and a Tommy Bahama tank top, all while quoting Rumi in a failed attempt to get laid.

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I also get why it’s so popular. In the summer it’s cheap and accessible, and there are no spring breakers. Big win!

Here is how to best approach your next trip there. Just please, don’t get your hair braided or bring back a plastic yard glass for the mantle.

If you scratch beneath the touristy veneer, you’ll find one of the most complex, magnetic regions in the Western Hemisphere. A place where pre-Columbian mythology still informs daily life, where the jungle breathes against limestone cenotes older than Christianity, and where tacos al pastor are carved with such reverence, you half expect to hear Gregorian chant in the background. This isn’t just Cancún and Tulum, it’s the modern Yucatán, still simmering with the quiet magic that drew the Maya here in the first place.

Summer, too, has its charms. Yes, it’s technically hurricane season, but that also means the crowds thin, the prices drop, and the beach becomes something closer to the untouched fantasy travel agents always promise. The heat brings a kind of lush delirium to the jungle; orchids burst, iguanas sunbathe like retirees, and the rain—when it comes—is a short, dramatic opera that cools everything and makes the air smell of wet earth and lime leaves.

More importantly, summer is when the Riviera feels like Mexico again. Hotel prices nosedive, meaning you can score a night at an eco-chic paradise in Tulum that normally books out a year in advance. Tour guides are suddenly patient. Bartenders remember your name. The mask of mass tourism slips, and what you get instead is something real.

And let’s talk food. The Riviera Maya is arguably the best place in the country to eat like a local and a king in the same day. You can breakfast on cochinita pibil tacos at a roadside stand for $3, lunch on grilled octopus with achiote butter at a chic jungle restaurant, and end the day barefoot on the beach eating wood-fired fish with your fingers while someone plays cumbia on a tinny speaker nearby. Try doing that in Capri.

Then there’s the wild, slightly anarchic mix of cultures. Where else can you wake up in a beachfront palapa, take a sweat-drenched bike ride through a Mayan archaeological site, eat Thai food that’s somehow sublime and go skinny-dipping in a bioluminescent lagoon, all before midnight?

So yes, the Riviera Maya is cliché. It's Instagrammed within an inch of its life. But it’s also rich, contradictory and impossibly seductive. And in the forgiving chaos of summer, when the tourist parade slows down and the real Mexico peeks out from behind the staged smiles, it becomes what travel is supposed to be: a little wild, a little strange and wholly unforgettable.