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Playa del Carmen is a beach town that sits about an hour south of Cancun on the Riviera Maya, as the strip of coast is known. Once a sleepy fishing town, the port was inadvertently put on the map by Jacques Cousteau in 1954 when he filmed an underwater documentary of the Great Mayan Reef just offshore of Cozumel Island, which lies about 12 miles offshore of Playa del Carmen (simply called “Playa”…