Travel Guide Ciudad Del Carmen

Ciudad del Carmen is at the western end of Isla del Carmen, a small island 37 km long and 7 m wide, connected to the peninsula by two bridges, Puente el Zacatal and Puente de la Unidad. Discovered by the Spaniard Antón de Alaminos in 1518, it was populated by few natives and the Spaniards paid little attention to it. It soon became a haven for English privateers who engaged in the lucrative trade of precious wood that arrived by barge from the south of the present state. The pirates were finally expelled by Don Felipe de Andrade on July 16, 1717, the day of the Virgen del Carmen, celebrated every year from July 15 to 31. Then the Spaniards resumed the export of precious woods and palo de tinte to Europe: the roofs of the city, as in Palizada, were covered with tiles imported from France, which the ships also used as counterweights. At the end of the 19th century, a new activity arose around the product of the chicozapote tree: chicle, which was used in the manufacture of chewing gum. Its trade dropped off in the 1940s when chemical substitutes made the natural sap obsolete. For a while, the coconut processing industry (soap, oil) compensated for the losses, but it was mainly the shrimp fishing industry that brought about a new golden age, before the discovery of oil in 1971... From then on, the town developed mainly around black gold, extracted from oil platforms that somewhat affect the environment. The island has however some beautiful beaches and is surrounded by the rich lagoon ecosystem of Terminos If its historical center is not as ostentatious as that of Campeche, the sinuous calle 22, which connects the Parque Ignacio Zaragoza to the Parque Benito Juárez, counts elegant houses whose frontages preserve French, Victorian and Art Deco features. And you can be seduced by its charm of a port city while strolling along the Malecón or in the Del Guanal district