The central meeting place of almost every village, town and city on the Yucatan for at least the last 2,000 years has been the "cenote" (sinkhole in English). The whole Yucatan peninsula is made up of limestone which has caverns and other dissolution features (karst) everywhere. Some are dry, some intermittently wet, and some are almost nearly always wet (cenotes). Whole rivers disappear below ground in many places and don't surface for miles. Given that the area can suffer from long droughts and very high temperatures, it's no wonder that the cenotes are both a life or death necessity and the ultimate luxury to these communities.

Most of the cenotes are above ground pools - some shallow some deep. The Dzitnup Cenote one was by far the coolest (visually and literally) that we saw. Picture a communal swimming pool that looks like Luray Cavens, but with deeper, and clearer water, that has been used by local residents for at least hundreds of years. You access it via a tiny well-worn stair case that takes you maybe 70 feet below ground level. The main cavern is, well, of cavernous dimensions and at an amazingly pleasant temperature. When we where there it was probably about 100 degrees F outside and maybe 80 inside the cenote -- AHH, so nice for a sunburned guero!