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Yucatan Cenotes, Sisal, and Surprises
Story and photos by Tim Leffel

After going through the admission building and past the locker rooms, the place didn’t look like anything special. There was just a dining pavilion and a few empty hammocks, connected by gravel paths. Through the doors and down the steps though it was a different world: a gigantic cave with a body of water that would take several minutes to swim across, with dive platforms and stairs built around it.

There are many layers to uncover in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, both in a physical sense and a blending of cultures. When the Maya ruled the region, building their cities and grand temples, it was all about alliances, war, and corn. Religious ceremonies looked to the stars and worshipped the gods who supplied the sun and rain that kept sizable cities fed. The underground cenotes were a source of water, but also a connection to the spiritual underworld, places of legend.

We hear a complicated tale of gods and tricksters on a guided tour of Cenote Zazil Tunich. Here the cavern stalactites and stalagmites create a scene that looks nothing like any place above ground, one that must have seemed eerie and unnatural to those who ventured down a shaft to see it. At the bottom a blue pool of water now invites in swimmers, vines hanging down from the surface to reach it.

At Chukum, one of the other cenotes near Valladolid, the water is even further from the surface and the cool pool of water is like a small, deep lake. A single shaft of light shines down through a hole in the ground above. From up top, it’s hard to tell where any cenote is, though locals say a toh (motmot) bird or yax che (ceiba) tree will often lead you to one.

In my years of travel in the Yucatan Peninsula, I've learned that these particular cenotes near Merida and Valladolid are just the start. Underground springs are dotted all over Yucatan state, a result of an event that altered our entire planet. This whole flat area is the epicenter of the Chicxulub Crater, the result of a meteor impact strong enough to change the Earth’s climate and kill off the dinosaurs. One unusual side effect is that there are very few rivers above ground on this peninsula, but lots of cenotes.

After the swimming excursions, we spent the night in Valladolid, a town that has benefitted from its proximity to the overflowing archaeological site of Chichen Itza. We wandered the streets of the historic center and admired the view from Meson del Marques hotel, resting up for the next day’s drive to Rio Largartos on the coast.

Flamingos and Las Coloradas of Rio Lagartos

I was a bit skeptical about the charms of Rio Lagartos after doing a little pre-trip research. One of just six sentences in the short Wikipedia entry for the place said, “The town and the pink lagoons have now become a popular tourist attraction, thanks to Instagram posts which make the lakes appear much more romantic than they really are.” I’ve been to enough places that have been overhyped and over-filtered by Instagrammers to know what a letdown that can be. The place also attracts flocks of flamingos though, which instantly upped the appeal.

The volume of flamingos rises and falls according to the season, but we had more than 100 to admire in the supposed low season for them when we arrived after a boat trip from the launching point town. They fed in pairs and groups around the shallow water, their thin legs and long necks changing their whole profile depending on whether they were resting or eating. “You are what you eat” is definitely true with pink flamingos, their color influenced by the small shrimp they feed on in these waters.

The colors of Las Colorados are a different story. While they’ve been turned into a tourist stop, they’re a man-made phenomenon—and industrial one at that. The area is a sea salt collection point between the Gulf of Mexico and the river. The varying evaporation stages of different pools of water determines the color of the water in them. Seldom photographed in the background is a giant processing factory turning what’s left in the pools into table salt.

On the boat ride out to the site we kept seeing Mexican tourists with white, chalky faces coming the other way in their boats. Was it some religious ritual? An early Day of the Dead make-up stage? Some kind of natural sunscreen? The last guess was closest: there are spots where the boat can stop for some mineral-rich mud slathering that’s supposedly good for your skin. We passed on the ghostly look when offered and had a heaping seafood lunch instead upon our return.

The Magical Yellow Town of Izamal

When touring the Yucatan state beyond the ruins and capital city, the yellow city of Izamal is a prime stop. The most famous thing to see is the Convent San Antonio of Padua Izamal, dominating the center of town. When the pope was coming to visit in the early 1990s, city leaders convinced everyone to paint their houses and buildings the same color as the convent. So the “yellow city” is a rather recent phenomenon that turned out to be a brilliant marketing move. Now it welcomes thousands of visitors a week for ten thousand selfies.

In the long history of this region, the late-1500s convent can be considered a recent addition as well. This was a major religious center for the Maya people, so as with so many spots in Latin America, that led the Spanish conquistadors to take over and replace the “pagan” structures with their holy Catholic churches. One giant pyramid is still intact, however, something I didn’t even discover on my first trip to Izamal more than a decade ago. Kinich Kak Moo is hidden behind buildings just a few blocks from the Franciscan convent, with minimal signage and no admission fee, like a relic that seems out of time and place. One benefit of this is that visitors can still climb to the top of this pyramid and get a panoramic view of the area.

Izamal was a major Mayan city founded in the BC era, so other stone structures are in people’s yards, in farmers’ fields, and scattered around the outskirts of town. We took an ATV tour to explore the area and ended up by another pyramid ten minutes later, vines and plants covering much of its surface but the shape still clear.

A Taste of Hacienda Life in Yucatan State

After touring Izamal we headed back toward Merida, pulling off the highway onto a road where the vegetation seemed to close in more on the vehicle the further down we went. We were staying at Hacienda Katanchel for the night and had to remember that “hacienda” is really just a word for “fancy farmhouse.” Most are bigger than a farmhouse would be in other countries though because these were self-contained villages with stores, processing machinery, at least one chapel, and often small train lines to transport workers and goods.

When we finally pulled up to the entrance of the hacienda, we could see that this was a grand one. The owners— Anibal Torres from Spain and Monica Ramirez from Mexico—expanded it even more after taking over a few decades ago, adding fruit orchards, gardens, and bungalow buildings. They can host groups of up to 80 overnight guests.

They proudly showed us around, pointing out flora and fauna with parental pride, as well as the spring-fed swimming pools and the old train tracks that now transport the luggage of arriving guests. The labor of love has gone on for a good portion of the owners’ lives now, through joys and difficulties. At one time the property functioned like a regular hotel, but that was already getting difficult to manage before major hurricane damage in 2005 led to a scaled-back approach with group bookings.

Worldly wise and with a well-rounded base of knowledge, they were a fountain of conversation topics at dinner. We heard tales of botanists and healers and scientists who had made discoveries on the grounds here, but also dove into rare bees, Spanish real estate, dietary changes, orchard taxes, "locust pruning," and whether a pitaya fruit was what really tempted Eve. I retired to my centuries-old room with its high ceilings and thick walls and drifted into complicated dreams.

Horseback Riding and Farming at Hacienda Zamna

While many of the Yucatan’s haciendas fell into ruin or became evocative lodging spots, others continued on as the center of farms. Sisal production continues, though on a more limited scale, but other haciendas specialize in different crops or they raise animals.

The latter is the case with Hacienda Zamna, which offers day trips from Merida for horseback riding and a taste of farm life. After seeing the original main building, we saddled up and rode through the gate into the fields beyond. We heard the goats and sheep before we saw them, their bleating noises carrying across a long distance. When we tied up the horses at their pen area and dismounted, we found a well-organized, humane open-air enclosure filled with animals of all ages. The head farmer handed me a baby sheep to hold, its nose nuzzling my neck as I tried to get a good look. “She was born this morning,” he told me, then pointed to another that also wasn’t here the day before. They were already wide-eyed and checking out the scene. Another, just a few days old, was wandering around looking lost. “Its mother is outside grazing right now,” he explained, “so it keeps going up to the wrong mother to eat.”

We rode back to the hacienda building and arrived at the horse stables, seeing well-fed horses and miniature version, then a mother pig surrounded by babies. One baby got rejected as a runt, so the workers were caring for it themselves, feeding it from a bottle and treating it like a pet.

After touring the corral area, we sat down for a snack of empanadas and got a welcome surprise: a local craft beer. Apparently one of the owners is a brewer, so there’s a branded Zamna pale ale that you can only get here.

Buried Pork, Hammocks, and Iconic Street Signs in Merida

The cuisine of Yucatan state is different than the rest of Mexico and anyone who is not a vegetarian ends up sampling the signature dish sooner or later: cochinita pibil. This local pork dish involves a sour orange marinade, achiote, spices, and pickled red onion accompaniment. The main differentiator, however, is the traditional cooking method. When done right, cochinita pibil is cooked underground in a pit with hot stones over a long period.

You can see this in action at the Museum of Yucatecan Gastronomy in Merida, a fine restaurant that’s also a museum and outdoor demo kitchen. Each afternoon the chef comes out and extracts a big batch of the cooked pork from under the ground, offering samples from the opened metal containers that were buried. It’s an interesting way to dine: eating representative dishes from the region and then learning about their history and methods in a museum on the same site, the displays in traditional Mayan houses.

There’s history of a more recent kind found while walking along the Paseo de Montejo boulevard of Merida. The stories always circle back to sisal, also known as henequen. The humble fiber is what made Merida such a rich city, but the history of the strands from this agave family plant go back to long before the conquistadors. The Mayan people used sisal for their hammocks, rope, clothing, and a kind of paper. The Spanish took everything up a notch and turned it into an export product used to make rope and twine. Demand was high from farms to factories to war vessels on the high seas for several centuries, so the sales funded vast haciendas and grand mansions on Merida’s Paseo de Montejo.

Eventually, the “green gold” of Yucatan state lost its shine as competition and then more durable materials for rope started taking market share. I saw some of this in action at Cielo Hammocks, one of the largest producers of Mexican hammocks. Many locals still sleep in hammocks, so they shop for them like we would a good mattress, plus there’s a huge export market for homes and resorts. Cielo may be a big operation, but villagers still make the cotton and nylon hammocks by hand, bringing them to a central collection point for transfer to Merida for sales and shipping.

As always when exploring Merida, I find surprises when I go wandering around the city. When we first arrived we went for a city tour on the “Carnavalito” bus, where the guide narrated in both English and Spanish. One story caught my attention as we rode through parts of the historic center. He mentioned that traditionally the streets didn’t have names, but rather picture markers that would offer directions to illiterate residents. They were named after a local landmark or business. Since the Spanish placed them on corners, there’s a theory that they were also a means of teaching Spanish words to Mayan-speaking locals.

How did I miss this before? Or did I learn it and forget about it? After I checked into my hotel in the Santiago neighborhood, I went wandering the streets to see how many of these street corner pictures I could locate. I ended up finding a dozen of them there, then a few more as I made my way toward the main plaza.

Back in 2016 there was news about a high school kind finding an archaeological site in the jungle of this region just by surfing Google Earth from his home computer and matching locations to star constellations. So the low-lying jungle here still conceals plenty of secrets. I’ll return to Yucatan state soon and will probably explore other haciendas, other Yucatan cenotes, and other hidden mysteries of Merida. I know I can count on finding more surprises around the corners.

IF YOU GO:
For more information on the region, see the extensive official Yucatan Tourism site. Follow these links for directions and opening hours for Zazil Tunich and Chukum cenotes.

Editor Tim Leffel is an award-winning travel writer and blogger who is based in Mexico. He is author of several books, including The World's Cheapest Destinations, Travel Writing 2.0, and A Better Life for Half the Price. See his long-running bargain travel blog here.

Related Features:
The Other Side of the Yucatan - Tim Leffel
Experiencing Day of the Dead as an Expat Family in Mexico - Cassie Pearse
A Quest for the Sacred Maya Book - Mary Jo McConahay
Worshiping Mixed Mexico: Rebirth, Resurrection and Sacred Spaces - Lydia Carey


See other Mexico travel stories in the archives

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