The road to Secret Beach, one of the most popular day trips on Belize's Ambergris Caye, is currently lined with something less Instagram-friendly than turquoise water: roadside dumping, construction waste and cleared mangroves. That was the message from a press conference and golf cart tour held on November 5th by the Ambergris North Alliance (ANA), a community group founded in 2024, alongside the San Pedro chapter of the Belize Tourism Industry Association.
The group's tour traced the northern road from San Pedro town to the Secret Beach turnoff at Mile 4.5 — the same route thousands of visitors travel by golf cart each week — pointing out dump sites along the way. According to ANA, some sites have sat for a year or more, and trash and sargassum are being used as landfill in spots where mangroves and lagoon habitat have been cleared.
ANA president Catherine Paz said the island isn't ready for the high season: roads are patchy and basic waste collection simply isn't happening at the scale needed. In September, the group wrote to local and national authorities asking for regular pickups, dump site removal and enforcement, but the response so far has been, in her words, patchwork — some road grading and temporary fixes rather than a lasting system.
The concerns go beyond aesthetics. ACES Wildlife Rescue described animals tangled in discarded fishing line, swallowing plastic and losing habitat. BTIA national president Efren Perez added broader worries about traffic congestion, zoning, erosion and sargassum, stressing that development is welcome but has to be sustainable and community-minded. The BTIA's Melanie Paz noted that past cleanups have been undone by fresh dumping, and called cleanliness everyone's job on the island.
ANA's proposals are practical: require waste disposal plans before trade licences are issued, provide proper receptacles at businesses and construction sites, monitor compliance, and beef up enforcement. The group is prioritising meetings with ministers, the mayor and agencies over protests, and urges residents to report dumping to the Department of the Environment.
For travellers, this matters if Ambergris Caye is on your list. Secret Beach is still very much worth the trip — calm, shallow water, beach bars, sunset swims — and tourism dollars are precisely what give local groups leverage to demand better services. Just temper expectations for a spotless roadside drive, consider supporting businesses that manage their waste properly, and know that the community pushing for a cleaner island is organised and vocal heading into the season.
Story first reported by The San Pedro Sun.
