Hurricane Dean slammed into Mexico's Caribbean coast today, sending heavy rain and wind gusts reaching 200 mph onto battered beach resorts in which tourists and locals huddled in makeshift shelters.

The seas churned as the eye of the storm, which has already killed a dozen people as it rolled over the Caribbean, made landfall near the cruise ship port of Costa Maya, not far from the border with Belize.

The US National Hurricane Centre said that it was the first top-level Category 5 storm to make landfall in the Atlantic Basin since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Dean was packing sustained winds of 165 miles per hour (268 kph), with stronger gusts, when it came ashore, but weakened to a still-dangerous Category 3 hurricane as it passed over the Yucatan Peninsula.

Tourists squeezed into a hotel serving as a shelter for 400 people in the resort of Playa del Carmen, where winds violently shook palm trees. As many as 12 people were sharing some rooms.

"We could be two or three days without water or electricity," said Emanuela Beriola, 41, an Italian holidaymaker who had stockpiled tinned meat, energy drinks and cans of tuna fish.

Dean was due to cross the Yucatan and come out in the Gulf of Mexico before hitting land again in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Category 5 hurricanes - the strongest possible - are rare but there were four in 2005, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, fuelling fears that global warming is leading to more severe storms.

Troops and police patrolled the "Mayan Riviera" area to enforce a curfew declared by the state government. Store windows were boarded up along the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, a strip of beach resorts with bright white sands that is yet to fully recover from the devastation of Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

The strongest Atlantic storm recorded, Wilma wrecked Cancun and other beach resorts. It washed away whole beaches, killed seven people and caused $2.6 billion in damages.

Mexico’s state oil company was closed and evacuated 18,000 staff from 407 oil and gas wells in the Campeche Sound, meaning lost production of 2.65 million barrels of crude per day.

Heavy rain drenched Belize, a former British colony that is home to some 250,000 people and a famous barrier reef.

"Absolutely this is one of the most dangerous and biggest hurricanes we have had so far," said Robert Leslie, cabinet secretary of the Belizean government.

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