Five people were detained for stealing sand from the sea floor and pumping it onto the beach in front of the Gran Caribe Hotel in Cancun, Mexico.
The powder-white sand beach in front of the hotel was closed and ringed by crime-scene tape, guarded by gun-toting sailors on Thursday.
“Today we made the decision to close this stretch of ill-gotten, illegally accumulated sand,” said Patricio Patron, Mexico’s attorney general for environmental protection. “This hotel was telling its tourists: ‘Come here, I have sand … the other hotels don’t, because I stole it.'”
$19 million has been spent by Mexico to replenish beaches eroded by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Much of the sand pumped from the sea floor has since washed away, leading some property owners to take matters into their own hands, building breakwaters in an attempt to retain sand, which often just shifts sand loss to beaches below the breakwaters.
In addition to illegally pumping the sand from the sea floor onto the beach, the Gran Caribe Real Hotel is also accused of building a breakwater that prevented the flow of sand onto other hotels’ beaches.
No one at the hotel was available to comment on the sand stealing allegations.