The city is on the western side of Chetumal Bay near the mouth of the Rio Hondo. Chetumal is an important port for the region, and Mexico's main port of trade with Belize.
In Pre-Columbian times Chetumal was the capital of a Maya state of the same name which controled roughly the southern quarter of modern Quintana Roo and the north-east portion of Belize.
During the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan Chetumal fought off several Spanish expeditions before finally being subjegated in the late 16th century.
The Maya revolt "War of the Castes" drove all the ladinos from this region in the 1840s for generations; many settled in British Honduras (modern Belize).
Chetumal was reestablished as a Mexican port town in 1898.
Two hurricanes in the 1940s leveled the entire town.
The population of Chetumal was small (about 5,000 in 1950) until the construction of highways linking it to the rest of Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s; the city then boomed with substantial emigration here from other parts of Mexico.
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