Greenpeace unfurled a giant banner in Mahahual on Tuesday to protest Royal Caribbean’s planned Perfect Day water park, putting the Mexico Review Rcl Project at the center of a fight over tourism and the coast’s mangroves. The banner read: “Perfect Day, water slides or environmental protection, that is the question.”
Royal Caribbean says the project will rise on just over 107 hectares in Mahahual, Quintana Roo, with a $1 billion investment and a launch planned for 2027. The company says the complex is meant to receive about 20,000 visitors a day in a town of just over 2,600 people, making the scale of the plan far larger than the fishing village that would host it.
That mismatch is why the project has become a flashpoint. Mahahual sits on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, about 932 miles from some of the country’s other major tourist corridors, and the company has already signaled how ambitious it wants the site to be. Royal Caribbean has described Perfect Day as “the biggest, boldest and most daring destination ever imagined” and as “a mind-blowing, record-breaking experience like no other,” with 30 water slides, six swimming pools, three beaches, 12 restaurants and 24 bars.
The company’s push into Mahahual accelerated in July 2025, when it acquired the Costa Maya port through Promociones Turísticas Mahahual after a multi-million dollar investment was finalized. Royal Caribbean also made more than $221 million in additional investment when it took administrative control of the port, and it has said the land and permits for the Perfect Day complex have been in place since 2025.
Greenpeace says the plan would do lasting damage before the first guest ever arrives. The group says the project will devastate the mangrove ecosystem, harm 300 species that live there and unleash a waste crisis involving hundreds of thousands of tons of debris as soon as construction begins. For a place as small as Mahahual, the concern is not just what gets built, but what cannot be undone once earthmovers move in.
Mexico’s environment ministry, Semarnat, said a few hours after the protest that the Perfect Day project in Mahahual is still undergoing environmental assessment and, to date, does not have environmental authorization for development, construction or operation. That leaves the project in a tense holding pattern: the company is presenting a destination meant to transform the coast, while regulators are saying the legal green light has not been given.
Perfect Day is intended to mirror Royal Caribbean’s CocoCay theme park in the Bahamas, but the arguments in Mahahual go beyond design. Some members of the community have raised concerns about irreversible environmental impacts, while others fear the company could walk away and leave local livelihoods exposed. Greenpeace campaigner Carlos Samayoa said after the protest, “We already know that. The message is that we will be watching them and that we will be calling on people to pay attention to the outcome of the decision.”
For now, the answer to the dispute is already clearer than the slogan on the banner. Royal Caribbean wants to turn Mahahual into a major cruise destination in 2027, but the project cannot move ahead until Semarnat decides whether the environmental cost is acceptable under Mexican law.
