Cancún, Mexico, has grown significantly in the last few decades, quickly becoming one of the most popular tourist destinations on the Caribbean Sea. The resort city was developed on the site of a coconut plantation with three residents in the 1970s and by 2019 was able to accommodate more than 6 million tourists. Its population and urban footprint has also boomed; in the mid-1980s the Cancún metro area was home to about 70,000 people, and today it has nearly 1 million inhabitants.