Hurricane Wilma guts Cancun

CANCUN, Mexico - One of the world's top beach destinations lay gutted today after Hurricane Wilma blew out hundreds of hotel windows, tore through boutiques and left the Caribbean resort of Cancun under water.

The lobbies of hotels along Cancun's famed sandy strip were littered with glass, chunks of plaster and other debris floating in floodwaters. Swimming pools were full of sand and ceilings were a mess of fallen tiles and tangled wires.

Where pristine beaches had been, jagged rocks poked out of grey water after Wilma tore away entire banks of white sand.

"It's going to take Cancun a year to recover. We can get the Coco Bongo club back up in three months but it will be a lot longer before tourists have the confidence to come back," said Argentine nightclub worker Gabriel Condi.

Wilma, one of the fiercest hurricanes to hit Mexico, hung over the Yucatan Peninsula for three days, blasting it with winds of up to 230km/h, drenching it with sheets of rain and killing at least seven people before heading toward the Florida Keys.

In the Paradise Beach hotel, part of the stairwell and patio had collapsed into sand below, leaving a 3-metre hole. Glass shards covered the lobby, and outside two statues of storks lay strewn on the ground.

Nearby, a shopping mall was laid bare, with all the windows blown out of stores and a McDonalds restaurant.

"I lived through Hurricane Gilbert and this is far worse. It's truly terrible," said shop owner Carlos Martin del Campo as he loaded computers into his car to save them from looters.

As thousands of locals lined up at the town hall for bags of pasta, crackers and cans of tuna being handed out by the army, Cancun Mayor Francisco Alor told reporters it could take six months for the Mexico's biggest tourism city to recover.

An estimated 90 per cent of hotels have suffered damage, local public works director Mario Castro said.

All along the "Maya Riviera," tourists, miserable after three days in shelters with no power or running water, descended on the few open shops and gobbled down potato chips and crackers instead of the lobster and margaritas they had come here to sample.

"It's been a terrible honeymoon. It just won't stop raining," said Italian Marco Marongui, 43, who had been sharing a room with his wife and two complete strangers, playing quiz games to pass the hours in the Playa del Carmen resort.

With no firm news about when Cancun's airport would reopen or when roads out would be cleared for buses, tourists filled the streets trying to arrange rides out of the city.

The situation was even bleaker in villages away from the tourist area, with countless wooden-shack homes destroyed.

In the poor Ejido neighborhood of Playa del Carmen, almost every residence was damaged and people wandered barefoot in its muddy streets trying to salvage what they could.

"It was a very ugly sound. All you could hear was the wind," said Maxina Llanos as she guarded her trashed home from looters. "We can't leave the house. There are lots of thieves around here."

- REUTERS