Hurricane Rina closed in on several Mexican beach resorts Wednesday, prompting evacuations, flight cancellations and advice to tourists to delay their visits to popular getaways like Cancun.
The storm weakened a Category 1 with sustained winds of 85 mph, after reaching 110 mph overnight as a Category 2.
On Wednesday morning, Cancun's airport was still open, though six flights had been canceled and the local state government advised prospective visitors to stay away for now.
"We recommend that people thinking of traveling just now do not; they should try and change their reservations for another occasion," Juan Carlos Gonzalez, Quintana Roo's secretary of tourism, told Milenio television.
Hurricane Rina is not expected to affect Mexico's main oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico or coffee-growing areas in Central America that were battered by heavy rains this month.
On Tuesday, there were around 80,000 tourists in the state of Quintana Roo. Most were foreigners, staying at hotels in Cancun and other resorts like Playa del Carmen and the island of Cozumel, popular with scuba divers and cruise ships.
By early Wednesday, the temperature had dropped and there was occasional rain in cloudy Cancun, which was devastated by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, the most intense storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. Most schools in Quintana Roo were closed.
Some cruise ships changed course to avoid Yucatan and the governor of Quintana Roo ordered hundreds of people to evacuate the fishing village of Punta Allen about 93 miles south of Cancun, where a hurricane warning was in effect.
Ten of the city's 54 shelters were preparing to take in evacuees. There are some 1,130 evacuees in the state, Quintana Roo's governor Roberto Borge told a news conference.
The Mexican government's storm warning extended across the north, northeast and east coast of the Yucatan peninsula.
The sixth hurricane in the 2011 Atlantic season, Rina was located about 200 miles south southeast of Cozumel island resort at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, and was moving west northwest at 5 mph.
The center of Rina was expected to be near or over the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula on Thursday. All of Mexico's ports in the Gulf of Mexico were open on Wednesday.
The director of the West Coast National Marine Park, Jaime Gonzalez Cano, said the hurricane would probably accelerate the erosion of Cancun's famous sandy beaches.
Wilma stripped nearly 60 percent of Cancun's sand. The Mexican government invested almost $149 million to rebuild the beaches in two separate attempts.
Companies that run marine parks around Cancun moved more than two dozen dolphins, some pregnant, from areas in the hurricane's path to safer sites farther inland.
The hurricane could dump 8 to 16 inches of rain over the eastern Yucatan peninsula through Friday.
A huge storm surge is also possible, raising tide levels as much as 7 feet above normal along the coast.
"The surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves," the hurricane center said.
Belize issued a tropical storm watch along its coastline north of Belize City but other Central American countries are not in the storm's forecast path. A warning was also issued for the Honduran bay islands of Roatan and Guanaja.
Downpours that started on Oct. 12 over Central America have affected more than 1 million people and destroyed crops in the region, the United Nations said Tuesday.
Most of Mexico's major oil installations are further east in the Gulf of Mexico, far from the hurricane's path.
