Sewage From Unconnected Colosio Homes Threatens Punta Esmeralda Cenote, Group Warns

Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo — A years-old proposal to connect homes in the Luis Donaldo Colosio neighborhood to the municipal sewer system has stalled, and the untreated wastewater from those households keeps flowing into local water bodies, including the cenote at Punta Esmeralda, the head of a local water conservation group said.

Alejandro López Tamayo, director general of the civil association Centinelas del Agua, said his organization promoted the connection project but has seen no follow-up, so the raw sewage continues to end up in the water.

Centinelas del Agua has monitored the cenote through 2024, 2025 and 2026 and found that contamination levels fluctuate, with periods of high pollution followed by stretches of cleaner water.

Working with the municipal Environment Department, the group has closed the cenote to recreational users when contamination concentrations spike and reopened it once conditions improve, López Tamayo said. The last closure came in 2023, under the administration of Lili Campos Miranda.

Technical proposal delivered twice, with no follow-up

López Tamayo said the group has presented its technical proposal for connecting the remaining households to the sanitary sewer system to two consecutive municipal administrations, and has now handed a copy to the current one as well. The group is still waiting for the city to act on it.

He argued that money from the Fideicomiso de Saneamiento Ambiental, the environmental cleanup trust, could fund the work, noting that few projects have actually been aimed at environmental sanitation — the purpose for which the trust was originally created.

He welcomed the municipal Environment Department’s announcement that it will evaluate water quality at three cenotes in Playa del Carmen, describing it as a pilot project that should be encouraged and expanded.

Without an invitation for these households to connect to the sewer network, López Tamayo added, all the infrastructure built to carry wastewater to the treatment plant will accomplish nothing, because the sewage will keep being dumped directly into the subsoil.