About Camila
Camila Ortega is Zeach's Americas Blue Flag Editor, covering certified beaches across Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America from her base in Mexico City. A researcher focused on eco-tourism standards and coastal community development, she tracks how the Blue Flag programme is evolving in regions where certification is newer, less uniform, and tied more directly to economic development than in Europe.
The Americas presents a genuinely different Blue Flag story. While European programmes are mature and densely certified, the Americas expansion is active and uneven — Brazil has a growing programme on its vast Atlantic coastline, Costa Rica is using Blue Flag certification as an eco-tourism differentiator, and Mexico's Pacific and Caribbean coasts are increasingly represented. Camila's coverage reflects this diversity rather than treating the Americas as a single bloc.
Mexico and the Caribbean
Mexico's Blue Flag beaches are split between two very different coastal environments: the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula (Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum corridor) and the Pacific coast from Baja California through Jalisco and Oaxaca. Both have strong tourism infrastructure driving certification, but the water quality dynamics differ — the Caribbean's clear, calmer water versus the Pacific's stronger swells and more variable conditions.
The Caribbean island Blue Flag programmes — across the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and others — are small in certified beach count but significant in terms of what certification means for island tourism marketing. Camila tracks these programmes through the relevant FEE national operators and local tourism authority publications.
Brazil and South America
Brazil's Blue Flag programme covers beaches along its 7,500-kilometre Atlantic coastline, with concentration in the northeast (Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco) and the south (Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul). Costa Rica has arguably the most sophisticated Blue Flag programme in Central America, with a national scheme that predates the FEE-affiliated certification and runs in parallel with it — Camila covers both.
Reviewed and edited by
All content by Camila Ortega is reviewed by Arjun Nair, Zeach's Coastal Research Editor, before publication.