We walked down stories of stairs into the earth. Our whispers echoed off the walls. At last, there it was: a wooden dock crouching over an underground pool of dazzling blue water. We had arrived at our first cenote.
Cenotes occur naturally in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where my wife and I spent part of our honeymoon. In thousands of locations, fragile limestone breaks down to expose groundwater just beneath the surface. Some cenotes are open to the air, though the coolest ones are in caves.
The Mayans considered cenotes sacred, performing cleansing rituals before entering them and often leaving sacrifices.
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