The fight to preserve Mexico’s portals to the underworld
Can the Yucatan Peninsula’s enchanting cenotes be saved?
ByIngrid Rojas Contreras / Photographs byRobbie Shone
On a sweltering day in April 2025, a small group of cave researchers led by José “Pepe” Urbina, a veteran cave diver, and Roberto Rojo, a biologist and speleologist, trudged single file through the dense, tropical forest of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. They were about 15 miles inland from the Caribbean coast. Moving slowly, they parted the brush with a machete as they searched for signs of their destination: a remote stretch of the flooded Zumpango Cave that probably no one had set foot in for years.
Suddenly, the vegetation thinned, revealing the jagged entrance of a gaping limestone tunnel heading underground. The air chilled as the team descended, navigating carefully around large stalactites. Then someone shouted “Uy!” and everyone saw it: There was an ancient Maya pot sitting on a recessed shelf of rock.
Such discoveries are not uncommon in the Yucatan, which contains a vast subterranean network of limestone caves with rivers running through them. When part of a chamber collapses, it forms a natural sinkhole that is called a cenote, a term that originates from the Maya word ts’onot.