Guests of the Gran Caribe Real Hotel on Cancun’s famed sandy beachfront awoke to a crime scene this past Thursday when they found the beach fronting the hotel to be taped off, and swarmed with police officers.

“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.’”

The hotel management stands accused of having pumped sand from the seabed nearby and illegally building a breakwater in a bid to preserve the sand on their stretch of the beach.

Retaining sand has become a chronic problem since Hurricane Wilma swept away the original sand in 2005. Since then Mexican authorities have spent US$19 million restoring the beach with new sand pumped from the sea bed.

However the sand doesn’t always remain, prompting property owners to build breakwaters which simply deprive other sections of the beach of sand.

Five people from the hotel were detained for allegedly pumping sand from the sea floor onto the Gran Caribe Real’s section of beach. No one at the hotel was willing to comment.

It has left some tourists annoyed including guests of the hotel who feel the police are spoiling the tourist venue and intimidating the atmosphere.

“I apologize to the tourists for this problem, but it is a question of enforcing the law,” Patron said.