☰Puerto Aventuras

Puerto Aventuras is a gated resort community on the Riviera Maya about 20 km south of Playa del Carmen, built in the 1990s around a man-made marina. It is self-contained and unusually quiet by local standards — a cluster of villas, condos and mid-sized hotels, a 9-hole golf course, a couple of dive shops, and a marina with a (controversial) dolphin enclosure in the middle. There is no "town" to speak of, just the resort and its services; most people who stay here do so as a base for day trips to the Maya ruins at Tulum and Cobá, the cenotes, and snorkelling at Akumal, which is famous for its nesting sea turtles.