Women help save Mexico's cenotes

Housewives now earn tourist cash after cleaning up one of the region's famous freshwater pools.

By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 15, 2007 edition

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Yokdzonot, Mexico - The name of this town in the Mayan language means "above the cenote," but for years the cenote, or freshwater pool, in the middle of this tiny community of 500 operated as the neighborhood garbage dump.

And then a group of middle-aged women here, looking for more work in a town where most families merely subsist on crops they grow on small pots of land, decided to capitalize on the growing craze for swimming, snorkeling, and scuba diving among the sinkholes that dot the tourist circuit throughout Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

The men called them foolish, and as the group of 25 cut through the jungle with machetes, the other women shook their heads. They hiked 20 meters down to the water's edge, dragging out glass bottles and plastic bags, one by one. They hiked up into the mountains to bring back flat stones to create foot paths, and cut down wood to create rails. The whole effort took more than a year.

"We are all housewives," says Mirna Yolanda Mendez, a mother of four, standing at the Yokdzonot Ecological Park and Cenote, which opened this winter. It is fringed by lush vines. The water is crystal clear, revealing brightly-hued fish below. On a recent day a family splashed around a dock anchored in the middle. "No one believed we could do it," says Ms. Mendez.

How Mexico's cenotes formed

Cenotes formed thousands of years ago, as ocean levels rose and fell over the Yucatán Peninsula. The region sits on of one of largest limestone platforms in the world, which has dissolved over time into flooded caves and underground rivers, whose openings are the cenotes spread across the region today.

Today, there are 3,000 cenotes registered throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, but an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 are believed to exist.

Sam Meacham, who runs the Center for Research of Aquifier Systems of Quintana Roo and has been exploring cenotes for the past decade, says they are to the Yucatán Peninsula what the "Alps are to Switzerland."

The sinkholes were integral to the lives of the ancient Mayan people. They not only provided their water source but were revered as entrances to the "underworld," and the ancients threw gold, jade, and even sacrificed bodies into them. Their Mayan derivation, dzonot, also means "sacred well."

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