As your jet descends for a landing at Cancún, you start to see what’s been drawing a whopping 3 million visitors a year to this skinny, “7”-shaped island at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

Your first image of the resort is a stunning, 14-mile (22.5 km) row of high-rise hotels dotting the island’s white-sand beaches. The plane banks, and you’re looking down at another eye-popper: a sprawling city of a half-million people on the mainland side of a short causeway from the island.

High-rise buildings line the white-sand beaches of Cancún Island.

Your welcome to Cancún awaits just inside the terminal. It’s from an army of sales reps handing out brochures on everything from the area’s six golf courses to its 26 shopping malls. A particularly colorful booklet touts snorkeling adventures, pirate cruises, simulated rocket rides, submarine dives and trips to the shrines of Mayan fertility goddesses.

Still another lists dozens of ear-splitting discos around town where you can gyrate the night away to the rock, Salsa and reggae picks of dreadlocked DJs.

It’s hard to imagine that just 35 years ago, the only people here were a handful of farmers. Cancún Island was just a strip of scrubby sand dunes, a nameless speck on maps of the Yucatán. And there was no Cancún City.

How Cancún Came About

The story of the resort goes back to the late 1960s. Until then, Mexico rated pretty low on the international tourism scale. For the most part, vacationers could either make a quick visit to one of the country’s wide-open border towns, or spend long hours — often over horrible roads — getting to some ritzy hideaways along the beaches and around Mexico City.

In 1969, the Mexican government decided to go all out to tap the country’s tourism potential. Super-resorts — built from scratch — would be the name of the game. Miles of beaches would be lined with luxurious but culturally friendly hotels. Airline flights from cities around the globe would make it easy to get there. And there’d be fun things to see and do for everyone, from bakers to bankers.

Named to spearhead the project was a new, well-heeled agency that came to be known as Fonatur, short for the Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo (National Fund to Promote Tourism). It was staffed by experts in fields ranging from marketing to land management, backed up by economists, archaeologists, sociologists, entomologists and a few programmers for those newfangled computers.