Proposed Riviera Maya Airport Fuels Region's Hope for Growth

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For years government officials in Mexico have discussed a new airport for the fast-growing region around Tulum, south of Cancun.

The Cancun airport is already over-run and annoying to second-home owners uninterested in the foam bars of the hotel strip. The drive to Tulum can easily take an hour, depending on traffic conditions on the one highway running the length of Riviera Maya. A new airport could open up the region for a wave of tourism and vacation-home development.

However, there appeared to be little progress on the airport, which is often the case when it comes to large infrastructure projects, especially in Mexico. Or as Shawn Bandick of One Stop Real Estate in Playa del Carmen notes, the local property industry will believe it, "when you see an airplane come down and go back up."

Now there appears to be some movement, with a recent endorsement by President Felipe Calderon, who called for the airport plan to move forward.

"Even more than the jobs created by its construction or operation are the jobs that will be created by having a completely different flow, both quantitatively and qualitatively of tourism towards this zone in the south of Quintana Roo, which has enormous potential," Calderon said

The airport, which is designed to handle more than 3 million passengers a year, including intercontinental flights, will cover 1,500 hectares west of Tulum and include a new six kilometer access road as well as an offshoot of the Tulum-Coba Highway, according to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Of course, reading between the lines of the statement, there are still major hurdles to overcome. The airport will be built through private investment, a "concession scheme," which is hardly guaranteed. The project would be the first airport in Mexico developed completely through private investment. The project will require 3.2 billion pesos to build, according to government estimates.

But Calderon says Mexico's economy is growing faster than expected.

"This means we should continue with the largest infrastructure program the country has had in a long time," he said.

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