A CLASSIC TRAVELOGUE John L. Stephens, North American explorer and travel writer, and his colleague, the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood, came to Central America in 1839, inspired by an edition they had found of Captain del Río’s expedition to Palenque in 1786. This, in Stephens’s blunt prose, had ‘roused our curiosity.’ Over the…
YUCATÁN CENOTES The elusiveness of water has always marked life in the Yucatán. There are no surface rivers anywhere north of Champotón, on the west coast, and the Belize border on the east. Rainwater sinks straight through the rock, and the Yucatán is honeycombed with caves and sinkholes (cenotes), including the longest underwater cave systems…
Puerto Aventuras to Xel-Há Puerto Aventuras, 20km (12 miles) from Playa del Carmen, is a purpose-built, Mediterranean-style resort village of hotels and villas created around a lavish marina and another beautiful beach. Just beyond is the series of seven bays known as Xpu-Ha, which are among the Riviera coast’s greatest beauties. Souvenir shopping in tourist…
Cozumel South of Isla Mujeres is the much larger island of Cozumel 8 [map] , 47km- (30 miles) long with a lighthouse at each end, and 16km- (10 miles) wide. Cozumel was another island that was a place of pilgrimage for Maya Yucatán in the Postclassic era, with several shrines dedicated to Ixchel. The principal…
TOURIST TRAP The turnover of the region to tourism may have brought much-needed wealth – but at what cost? Bathed with water so turquoise it seems to define the Caribbean dream, blessed with mile after mile of ravishing sandy beaches and boasting a climate that’s utterly tropical, it is easy to understand the meteoric rise…
FIRE AND RAIN In the Yucatán, the two main village festivals are related to rain and fire. The rain ceremony is known as Cha-Chaac and takes place at the start of the maize-growing season in February. The ceremony is led by a shaman or H-men who prepares the traditional drink of balche, a mildly intoxicating…
Fact One of the most influential early explorers of Maya sites was the Frenchman Désiré Charnay. It was he who first photographed Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá, and these superb photographs and lithographs led the way for the first scientific archeological expeditions. Exploring the site On entering Chichén, the view is dominated by the 24-meter…
THE YUCATÁN’S GILDED AGE The late 19th century was a boom time for the Yucatán, with a prosperity based on ‘green gold,’ henequen from the agave plant, used to make the rope known as sisal. Such was the demand from Europe’s and the United States’ farms, ships, and factories for sisal rope that the Yucatán…
By now, it should be the case that most readers will be eager for a reminder that mattering is double edged and mattering is an exceptional positive resource. While much of the focus in this chapter has been on feelings of not mattering and how they relate to the will to die, positive feelings of…
The frustrated needs linked with feelings of not mattering include the need for con-nection with other people (see Flett et al., 2022). The link between feelings of not mattering and loneliness has documented in several studies (e.g., Flett et al., 2022; McComb et al., 2020), and we have emphasized the double jeopardy that exists when…