Many Calakmul ejidos are now pivoting from ranching, agriculture and illegal logging to conservation work, including community forest management and the sustainable cultivation of organic products, like the nutrient-rich Ramón nut, silky Melipona honey that won over the Noma chef René Redzepi and Chicza, an all-natural chewing gum made exclusively from chicle, which the Maya people have harvested from the sap of the chicozapote tree since ancient times. Anyone who has recently visited Cancún’s receding shoreline or Tulum’s beach road crammed with air-conditioned hotels running on diesel generators knows of the ecological devastation that development has wrought.Ī big part of the Jaguar Alliance’s conservation work has been orchestrating deals between the government and local farming communities called ejidos. An alternative visionĮven though there are still more jaguars on the Yucatán Peninsula than anywhere else in the country, it’s the only region in Mexico where the animal’s range has diminished - in part because of the development of the so-called Riviera Maya, a string of heavily developed beach towns that snakes down the Caribbean coast from Playa del Carmen to Tulum.
Then, back at the hotel, I walked down a long wooden pier to one of the stilted palapa huts that sit on the lagoon and watched the sunset over the mangroves, looking toward the jungle beyond, where the jaguars would soon be making their nightly migrations. “Even with the passage of time, the people remember.” Light dazzled the surface of the water, long known as the “lagoon of seven colors,” but it has dulled in recent years as development puts pressure on its fragile ecosystem.Īfter our sail, I stopped at Navieros Bacalar, a roadside open-air cevicheria where foreign visitors and Mexican families dined on ceviches and local specialties like octopus “a la diabla,” cooked in a deep-red sauce of ancho and árbol chiles. “The jaguar is seen like a really mythical animal by the Mayan people from here,” said Diego Valdovinos Ramirez, a 21-year-old guide who captained the group sailing excursion I took through the lagoon. Perhaps most crucially, the jungle of Calakmul is home to the highest concentration of jaguars in Mexico. From under the forest canopy came the guttural, trash-compactor roar of the loudest land animal in the world, one of many endangered species that live here, along with pumas, toucans, spider monkeys and coati-mundis.
It was early evening, and the black howler monkeys were waking up. Calakmul was once one of the largest and most powerful cities of the Maya world, but now it stands in ruins, hours from the nearest urban center and enveloped by the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, one of the biggest swaths of unbroken tropical forest in the Americas. When I was there in March, there were hardly any other visitors. The jungle stretches out infinitely in every direction, an ocean of green punctuated only by the stepped pyramid peaks of two other Maya temples. From the top of the great pyramid of the ancient Maya city of Calakmul in the southern Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, you can see all the way to Guatemala.
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