What to do 24 hours in the Mexican Chetumal: soak up Mayan culture, have a 'pozolazo' and bathe in the Bacalar lagoon

On September 14, 2003, a newborn manatee was found in the Guerrero lagoon system, next to Chetumal Bay, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.

He immediately felt loved by a community that visited him and provided him with food.

Someone named him

Daniel

.

For his first 12 years he was in semi-captivity.

When he had the chance to be completely free, what did he do?

Did he go to explore the seas?

No, he returned to Chetumal Bay to stay, as if someone had explained to him: “This is a sanctuary for threatened species like yours, it is a protected natural area where you will have sporadic company and submerged vegetation to feed on.” .

Since he returned,

Daniel

has become a tourist promoter and the friendly aquatic mammal coexists with everyone who visits this important ecological conservation site.

Daniel

was the first project to rehabilitate, release and monitor a specimen of the Trichechus Manatus species.

The biologists warned not to give him food, who paid attention?

Nobody.

And there is

Daniel

, like a fish in water (ha), being the object of affection and jokes.

There are those who jump into the sea and hug it to later post the photo on the networks.

There are those who sing songs by Alfredo El pulpo and his keyboards: “We are going to dance the cumbia del sapito / We are going to enjoy the cumbia del sapito.”

There is someone who prepares dinner for him.

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These things happen in Chetumal, a city whose advertising claims, rightly, announce: “Mexico begins here.”

Of course, it is the starting point of the Mexican Caribbean, border with Belize.

It has a lot of history, great surroundings and that boardwalk culture that generates such a good vibe when the weight of the day leaves with the sun and the afternoon dies.

9.00 Delicious chaya empanadas and archaeological immersion

To make a composition of place and history, there is nothing like a café idolized by the native population for its succulent breakfasts.

An illustrious place that pays tribute to Chetumal's logging, chiclero and sailor past, when roads barely reached here.

As in other cities that face the sea, there is a Café del Puerto

(1)

.

They offer Mexican breakfast classics, of course, and also local classics like delicious chaya empanadas.

It is noisy, it is full of families who take it easy and repeat coffee with cinnamon, there are giant television screens and the air conditioning machines emit more noise than cold, but the morning flows like when the Shibuya traffic light turns on. green.

The archaeological zone of Oxtankah, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Gummy Bone (Getty Images)

In the surroundings of Chetumal there are archaeological remains from the pre-Hispanic era such as Kohunlich, where the temple of the masks stands out, built around the year 500 BC;

Dzibanché, founded around 200 BC;

and its neighboring acropolis of Kinichná.

However, perhaps the most decisive site is Oxtankah

(2)

, a pre-Hispanic city with Mayan vestiges of great relevance due to the presence of the first Catholic church after the arrival of the Spanish.

It is a chapel with a semicircular arch that clearly clashes with the style of the rest of the buildings.

For some reason it is said that it was here where the union of the Spanish Gonzalo Guerrero and the princess Zazil Há, daughter of the chief Nachán Can, took place, who gave birth to the first mestizos.

A detail that makes Chetumal also known as “the cradle of miscegenation”, something that is certified by the sculpture of this family: the monument to the cradle of miscegenation.

11.00 A 'pozolazo' and Mayan worldview

Anyone who has not yet fully woken up at this hour

will find an excuse to have a

pozolazo in the colorful municipal market

(3)

.

Pochol

or

pochotl

, a common drink among Mexicans around here, is a cold drink made of flour dough with natural cocoa that has survived since pre-Columbian times, when it was drunk to quench thirst and hunger (it is practically chewed)

and

as an energizer, ideal for entering the Museum of Mayan Culture

(4)

, one of the most important museum sites of this civilization.

The building is the work of the architect and museographer Jorge Agostini, who worked with the great Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and had Carlo Scarpa as a reference (especially his intervention in the Castelvecchio di Verona museum).

Agostini demonstrates here an accomplished management of the space and the narrative of the museographic discourse.

He divides the exhibition area into three floors equivalent to the three surfaces of the Mayan world: the earth, the sky and the underworld.

La Fuente Del Pescador, on the Chetumal boardwalk.Hemis (Alamy / Cordon Press)

As a whole, the visit offers an informative tour of the Mayan culture and its customs, precious objects such as jade, hunting and fishing, the importance of corn as sustenance or the ceiba tree as a sacred tree... to capture the everyday life and grandeur of their architecture and their worldview, thanks to which they perceived that their existence and everything created by their divinities was harmonized with the cycles of nature.

13.00 'Gastro' dilemma: tuna toast or lobster pizza

If irresistible hunger breaks out (there have been cases) you should go to Almina

(5)

as soon as possible .

The tuna toast and the catch of the day with lemon are big words and go very well with a simple atmosphere that, facing the waves of the bay and splashed by the wind that cleans the curve of the boardwalk, is most harmonious.

Like everything in Chetumal, there is no trace of ostentation, but quite the opposite.

🍖Discover new flavors at Almina🤤🤤🤤 🎉ORDER OR RESERVE: https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1fm9wMENU: https://l.linklyhq.com/l/1fup2LOCATION: https://l.linklyhq. com/l/1fup9Today I feel like going to Almina

Posted by Almina on Thursday, June 1, 2023

If hunger can be resisted, it is worth considering the option of going to the town of Mahahual

(6)

.

The journey takes more than thirty minutes, yes, but it is worth it.

This is the first beach in the Mexican Caribbean.

The boardwalk that stretches from the lighthouse to the so-called fishing pier condenses the townspeople and the relaxed tourist in such a way that it is difficult to differentiate them.

There are stalls where winter ponchos are also sold as floats.

There is a native fisherman named Eider who offers snorkelling by the reef and then seafood and lionfish tasting at his own home.

Be careful with the lionfish, if it bites the spine it is poisonous.

There are beach bars committed to conservation between whose tables a sign announces: “Wanted for filthy and evil monster that leaves this trail on the beaches” along with four plastic bottles.

Shops on one of the streets in the coastal town of Mahahual (Mexico).Arterra (Getty Images) (Arterra/Universal Images Group v)

In the Chilangaloense mezcalería and cevichería a Rastafarian in trance plays the electric guitar who one day discovered elevator music and saw the light.

There are very large families loaded with refrigerators that are divided like this: the grandmothers and daughters under the umbrella, the children wherever they want and the men in a circle in the water simulating a ceremony that consists of sticking their knees in the sand leaving half body out and taking the line of the sea as a fictitious bar on which to rest the beer can.

There are some Spanish girls who look at their cell phones on the sun lounger without having had enough sleep.

There are some Italian boys who observe the blue of the sea as a kingdom of impressions while they imagine living here.

You have to be very picky not to consider this lack of overcrowding as something great, and you have to be very strange not to succumb to that gastronomic specialty called lobster pizza that they do so well in Luna de Plata, Quinto Sole or No Hochkay, and whose flavor is capable of derailing all plans.

16.00 Quick to the rapids

Before reaching Bacalar you have to stop at its famous rapids

(7)

.

There is no better gateway to the Bacalar lagoon, one of the seven natural wonders of Mexico, than this secret, narrow and fascinating channel of turquoise blue waters.

We are facing a 1,000-year-old natural sculpture bordered by stromatolites.

It is difficult to find in today's globalized world in which the tourist goes one way and the native goes the other, a place where the two mix so naturally.

A swimmer and a kayak in the rapids of Bacalar (Mexico).Sailingstone Travel (Alamy / Cordon Press)

You can kayak or simply put on a vest, let yourself be pushed by the current and enjoy the horizon of the sky thinking about the art of inhabiting the world and the pleasure of discovering it this way, without leaving traces, meekly, as in the

Song of the Open Path

of Whitman: “The earth: That is enough.

I don't want the constellations to get closer.

I know they are very well where they are.

I know that those who inhabit them are enough.”

The ideal way to become familiar with the hues of the Bacalar lagoon is by boat.

Tours

of this natural wonder created from the largest freshwater stromatolite system in the world

are organized

from the Amainah hotel

(8) .

Rich in calcium carbonate, they give the white background and, when bathing, the sensation of stepping on plaster and a fragile ecosystem that requires due respect.

The different depths cause the seven or more shades of blue, it is an optical effect.

Inside the lagoon, the blue cenote is scary, 90 meters deep and 300 meters in diameter, be careful.

At noon, when the sun spreads its strength, more than seven colors shine on this crystalline sheet.

As the hours go by, the light becomes dim, so it is worth spending a few minutes saying goodbye to the day on the hotel terrace, facing the lagoon, at that time when the sun melts like ice.

Aerial view of one of the cenotes in the Bacalar lagoon (Mexico).Pyrosky (Getty Images)

20.00 High-altitude dinner, the true mythology of the trip

Leaving behind the Fort of San Felipe de Bacalar

(9)

and its echoes of battles and pirates, it is appreciated to walk through dimly lit streets.

When a bus passes by on the back of which they have written “problems are passengers,” the rhythms of Immasoul (the Rosalía of Chetumal) come blasting from the bar La Jungla: “And it could be that, in another dimension, we are everything.” ;

And it may be that it doesn't happen, and everything is just temporary…”

Next door awaits the Finisterre Bacalar restaurant

(10)

, where you can celebrate your reunion with lobster on a spicy pasta.

There is so much timelessness around that one feels that the night does not cover anything, it only proclaims.

So many turns taken during the day to finally find the true (and also fleeting) image of the trip.

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