Campeche lost to tourism in Mexico’s Yucatan
State is rich in Mayan sites, including the ruins at Calakmul and Xcalumkin
Of the nearly 1,000 registered archeological sites scattered across the southeast Mexican state of Campeche, Xcalumkin is far from the most impressive. Just more than 64 kilometres northeast of the state capital (also called Campeche), it looks, at first glance, like little more than a few half-excavated hillsides.
But it didn’t take long for this abstraction of a city to come to life. Hills revealed themselves as pyramids. Fields became plazas. A cave opening suddenly in the ground — a tree, like an umbilical cord, growing from its centre — became a reservoir.
I had come out that morning with Rubi Peniche Lozano, who runs a restaurant called Capuchino in the historic centre of Campeche, and Lirio Suarez Amendola, a former delegate for the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH.
Suarez walked us through the site, pointing out the hidden mouths of cisterns and offering INAH’s best guesses as to what each structure might have been. Xcalumkin, she told us, had likely existed since the beginning of the millennium but, like most settlements in this part of the peninsula, would have flourished between the eighth and 10th centuries, part of a vast network of city-states and vassal towns that made up the classical Mayan world. By A.D. 950, that world had all but disappeared.
“To make the stucco they used to cover the buildings and pave the roads, they needed charcoal, so imagine how many trees they needed,” she said as we looked down into the reservoir that was now a cave. “They emptied their water sources, cut down all their trees. The temperature raised two degrees. They changed the climate completely.” She sounded almost exasperated. “They were just like us: human beings.”
We had reached Xcalumkin by driving north along the modern highway that connects Campeche to Merida in the neighbouring state of Yucatan, following the route of the Camino Royal, or Royal Road, built for the visit of Mexico’s short-reigning Habsburg Empress Carlota in the late 19th century.
The afternoon would take us to artisan towns such as Dzitbalchen, known for its embroidered blouses, and Becal, where Mexico’s finest Panama hats are woven from hairthin lengths of palm in damp underground caves. The whole day, we didn’t pass a single other traveller. Despite its pastel-hued jewel box of a capital, its rich archeological history, a clutch of top-notch hotels and food to compete with anything on the peninsula, Campeche remains mercifully lost to tourism.
Campeche’s star attraction should be the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul, once the most powerful citystate in the classical Mayan world, now an immense archeological site buried deep in the wild southern jungles of the 7,252-square-kilometre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.
But while Chichen Itza and Tulum, in the neighbouring states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo, attract as many as 5,500 visitors per day, Calakmul draws barely 100.
From the early 10th century until the late 1920s, when, according to the oral tradition of the local rubber tappers, an American prospector spotted the site from a low-flying plane, Calakmul was lost to time and memory (its presence was officially registered by INAH in 1931). Excavations didn’t begin until the 1980s.
At the entrance to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, I dropped my things at a serene ecolodge called Puerta Calakmul, by far the best hotel in the area (high-season rates start at $175), and crossed the road to see the exquisitely preserved stucco frieze at Balamku, one of many smaller archeological sites in the area. The next day, I picked up my guide, Manuel Pech. At the ceremonial centre, we climbed a flight of steep stone stairs to the summit of the highest pyramid. Fifteenhundred years ago, kings and priests would have performed their ceremonies here — coronations, perhaps, or sacrifices, though no one knows for sure — looking out over a city of 50,000 people.
I left Calakmul the following day and about 40 kilometres before Campeche, I stopped at Edzna, whose carefully reconstructed galleries, pyramids and open plazas rival Calakmul’s in grandeur. A short distance from Hacienda Uayamon — Campeche’s most luxurious hotel, housed in the restored remains of an 18th-century plantation — Edzna is Campeche’s most popular archeological site. Even still, on the day I visited, there were more iguanas than people. When I reached Campeche that evening, I settled in at the Hacienda Uayamon’s sister hotel, Hacienda Puerta Campeche, just inside the city walls (rates in high season start at $418).
Local historian Alejandro MacGregor Gonzalez told me, “Contraband was this city’s glory!” MacGregor showed me around the elegantly restored old quarter centre of his hometown and its northern and southern edges, where the peaceful streets give way to mangroves and scruffy urban beaches. He told me about centuries of pirate attacks and the city walls — the last of their kind in Mexico — built to fend them off. He told me how his own ancestors, Scottish privateers, had arrived here in the 17th century via Charleston. The name Campeche, he explained, derives from the words “kaam,” meaning “mirror,” and “pech,” meaning “birds” in the nearextinct local dialect of Mayan. “Campeche is literally ‘a mirror for the birds!’ ” he said.
I’ve never known someone to speak with so many exclamation points.
That evening, I walked along quiet, cobbled streets past candy-coloured houses where old men and women sat out on the sidewalks to play cards and gossip. For dinner, I ate tamales and drank coconut horchata, slushy and sweet as a milkshake, at the open-air Portales de San Martin just outside the old city walls (there are several small restaurants, or “antojerias,” located in the Portales, all serving more or less the same food).
I had come back to Campeche, despite warnings about the May heat, to see an archeological site that Pech had told me about, not far from Calakmul.
His grandfather, he told me, had uncovered it back in 1950 during his youth as a rubber tapper.
The first archeologist officially entered the site in 1993, guided by Pech’s grandfather, and although INAH spent a year restoring it in 2001, they soon abandoned it to the forest. They called the place Nadzcaan — Mayan for “Closer to the Sky.”
Nadzcaan isn’t technically open to the public, but the only real restriction on getting there is stamina since it is set about14 kilometres back from the road.
Walking in, we passed iridescent wild turkeys and the fresh tracks of feral pigs. A troop of spider monkeys high up in the trees shook branches to scare us off. Eventually, Nadzcaan emerged from the forest, the 130-foot pyramid at its centre dissolving into the trees.
That night we camped on top of the pyramid. I asked Pech what the Maya would have used this place for. He dragged a finger across his throat. “Sacrifice probably,” he said, “but we never really know.”
The best we can do is guess what this world once looked like and how it all came crashing down.
As the sun set, I looked out over the forest. Howler monkeys called from the distance. Cicadas chirred. A blood moon rose slowly into a bank of clouds and emerged, a half-hour later, washed clean. Pech smiled. “It’s like a mirror,” he said.