Yucatan Peninsula
Discover Yucatan Peninsula
Introduction
The Yucatán is a flat slab of limestone with no rivers on its surface at all. The rain simply drains through, which produced the cenotes — thousands of sinkholes opening into flooded caves, some of them part of the longest underwater cave systems in the world. They were the peninsula’s only water supply, which is why the Maya cities were built around them, and they are now among the best swimming anywhere.
Those cities are the reason to come. Chichén Itzá and Uxmal are the famous two, Tulum sits on a cliff above the Caribbean, and Calakmul is buried deep in forest near the Guatemalan border with almost nobody there. Merida, the regional capital, is a colonial city built largely out of stone quarried from the ruins, and its nineteenth-century wealth came from henequen, the agave fibre that made the world’s rope.
The Caribbean side — Cancun and the coast running south — sits on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest reef system in the world, with the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve below it. Yucatec Maya is still spoken by several hundred thousand people, the cooking is distinct from the rest of Mexico, and the hurricane season runs from June to November with the highest risk in September and October.