This Nationwide Park in Belize Is Rooted in Sacred Mayan Therapeutic Traditions — What It is Wish to Go to

Smoke curled round my physique as Maria Garcia, a Yucatec Maya healer, walked round me in circles, swinging a pail of incense. I closed my eyes and inhaled the spicy perfume — copal resin blended with cinnamon and rosemary — whereas Garcia brushed my limbs with a bundle of piper amalago leaves. The plant, a part of the household that features widespread black pepper, is sacred to the Maya for its therapeutic properties. “We use it like a brush to take away all the negativity,” Garcia stated. “You give all that’s not good to the plant and the plant provides you its power.”

I used to be standing in Garcia’s jungle-like backyard in San Antonio, a small Mayan village within the western district of Cayo, in Belize. Bordering Guatemala, Cayo was in historical instances a middle of Mayan civilization. Now it’s residence to Noj Ka’ax H’Males Elijio Panti Nationwide Park (EPNP), one in all 4 parks within the nation comanaged by the Mayan neighborhood.

Established in 2001 due to the efforts of the Itzamna Society, a bunch fashioned by Indigenous Maya to guard their ancestral lands, the park is a cultural sanctuary for members of the neighborhood dwelling in and round San Antonio. Its title, which implies “canopied rainforest of healers,” additionally honors Garcia’s late uncle, Elijio Panti, who was a distinguished religious chief and healer.

With Garcia as its chairperson, the Itzamna Society helped run the park till 2009, when the group misplaced its settlement with the federal government, leaving the treasured panorama susceptible to loggers and poachers. “The park went into abandonment,” Garcia stated. Greater than a decade of negotiations ensued, and in 2022 the Itzamna Society regained its stake within the park. Since then the rainforest, which shelters a whole lot of medicinal crops in addition to tapirs, jaguarundis, peccaries, anteaters, and numerous tropical chicken species, has slowly begun to get better.

Wrapping a pair of leaves round my wrist, Garcia pressed her thumb into my pulse level and murmured a blessing. When she completed, she handed me the foliage. “That is your bundle,” she stated. “You must launch it when the solar is setting. Go all the way down to the riverside and do like this.” She mimed throwing the bundle over her shoulder. “However don’t look again. Do it together with your coronary heart and the night time will maintain it.” 

Earlier that morning, Kenny Garcia, Maria’s nephew and one in all EPNP’s 4 rangers, had picked me up at Gaïa Riverlodge for the quick trip to San Antonio. (I had arrived the earlier afternoon after flying in to Belize Metropolis, two hours to the east.) Tucked into the plush highlands of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, the lodge companions with the Itzamna Society to supply friends cave excursions and waterfall hikes within the park. My cabana, with its hovering palm-thatched roof, clung to a hillside coated in tropical vegetation. By way of a wall of screened home windows, I might see the 5 Sisters waterfall, which Maria Garcia later instructed me had been named for her and her siblings. Every morning, I woke to the musical trills of rusty sparrows and hepatic tanagers. Within the evenings, I sampled cocktails infused with mint and pineapple purée whereas peach-colored sunsets solid a glow throughout the deck.

After my therapeutic ceremony, Kenny took me to the park. We bumped alongside a mud highway by fertile farmland on the outskirts of San Antonio, the panorama a testomony to the village’s agricultural heritage. “Once we first got here again, hunters would cross proper by us with their weapons and their meat,” Kenny stated once I requested him in regards to the park’s situation following the Itzamna Society’s lengthy absence. Final winter, he and his colleagues encountered three poachers throughout a routine patrol. The trio fled into the forest earlier than they might be detained, however they deserted shotguns and a sack containing deer meat and a gibnut, a prized recreation animal, all of which the rangers confiscated. “That made a huge effect in the neighborhood,” Kenny stated. “Since then, we haven’t seen any hint of hunters.”

Caves had been sacred to the traditional Maya, who noticed them as portals to Xibalba, the underworld. Belize is residence to a whole lot of caverns the place Mayan clergymen as soon as held rituals to petition the gods for rain or a profitable harvest. A number of the most well-known are in Cayo, most notably Actun Tunichil Muknal, which attracts upward of 100 guests a day. However immediately, deep in EPNP, the park’s exceptional Providing Cave, recognized to the Maya as Ka’am Be’en Actun, can be ours alone to discover.

Close to the park boundary we stopped to select up Antonio Mai, a San Antonio native who has served as a curator of the Providing Cave for greater than 20 years. It took us about 45 minutes to succeed in the trailhead. Rangers navigate the rugged rainforest roads on motorbikes, however in Kenny’s truck, the going was sluggish. A brief hike led to a sequence of terraces that Mai stated the traditional Maya used for public gatherings. 

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Archaeologists imagine the Providing Cave grew to become a pilgrimage web site throughout a devastating drought across the yr 900 that contributed to the collapse of Mayan civilization. Cave rituals, together with human sacrifice, elevated throughout that point — determined choices made to Chac, the rain god. Solely clergymen might enter the caves; everybody else congregated exterior. “It was like fashionable instances,” Kenny stated. “If you happen to had been rich, you could possibly afford a greater view. If not, you had been means within the again.”

Once we reached the cave’s entrance, I gasped at its enormity. Donning a helmet with a robust headlamp, I adopted Mai into the darkness. Cave moths clung to the partitions, their tiny eyes glittering in my lamp’s beam. The papery flutter of bats’ wings echoed by the gloom. We ducked beneath a curtain of stalactites and entered a small alcove. In a single nook, fires from historical rituals had left the limestone ceiling blackened by soot. Pottery fragments, together with the highest half of an enormous ceramic vessel, lay scattered throughout the dust flooring. These historical artifacts — choices the Maya made greater than a millennium in the past — had been the type one would anticipate finding in a museum.

Mayan tradition, previous and current, runs deep in Cayo, and I noticed indicators of it all over the place I went. One morning I paddled the Macal River, a meandering waterway the Maya navigated by canoe. I wandered the ruins at Xunantunich, an essential archaeological web site set on a ridge above the Mopan River, and climbed El Castillo, its 130-foot pyramid. On my final day I visited the San Antonio Ladies’s Cooperative, the place I made a pinch pot out of wealthy, crimson clay utilizing a standard Mayan hand-building method. Later, I realized the best way to grind nixtamalized corn on a stone metate stated to be centuries previous and type the dough into tortillas, which members of the cooperative cooked over a wooden fireplace. Brushed with coconut oil and sprinkled with salt, the tender tortillas tasted each candy and savory.

Again at Gaïa, I took my bundle of piper amalago all the way down to Privassion Creek, the place I swam within the massive pool on the base of 5 Sisters Falls, letting the water tumble over my shoulders. When the solar started to drop towards the mountains, I rock-hopped alongside the riverbed to a quiet spot the place a small cascade spilled right into a basin. I clutched the bouquet and stated a phrase of gratitude. I had come to go to a park and was leaving with a newfound appreciation for the best way small teams of individuals could make a distinction on the planet. Closing my eyes, I tossed the bundle behind me. I might inform by the frenzy of the creek that, simply as Maria had promised, the night time would maintain it.  

Daylong excursions of the caves and waterfalls of Noj Ka’ax H’Males Elijio Panti Nationwide Park may be booked by way of Gaïa Riverlodge. 

A model of this story first appeared within the February 2025 subject of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Kindred Spirits.”