The terms globalization and tourism tend to be regarded as synonyms in the Mexican Caribbean, an area which shifted from a virtually uninhabited borderline territory to a tourism center receiving over six million visitors peryear. Territorial occupation patterns derived from tourism -identified during field work through a physiognomic analysiswere used to investigate some of the implications of the complex relationship between tourism and development, the latter including not only economic but human factors, as well as with the natural and cultural environment characterized by both a great diversity and a great fragility.