Indagare Tours: Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

You may not be able to pronounce it but touring Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave is a long-standing adventure and cultural highlight in Belize. Blessedly abbreviated to just ATM, this cave provides a true adventure day combining easy hiking, swimming, cave exploration and sacred sites used by ancient Mayans for rituals including human sacrifice. This popular guided day trip is a high-adrenaline visit through a remarkable Mayan museum.

The tour kicks off in the early morning in San Ignacio. After a bumpy, 45-minute ride you will hike along a flat, scenic and mostly-shaded trail through the jungle for about 30 minutes until you reach the mouth of the flooded cave system which gapes open like a mysterious indoor/outdoor pool. It’s filled with crystal-clear water and the deepest section on the tour is right at the beginning. The only way in is to swim. After the initial swim the water never gets much more than knee-deep high but the trail through the cave is wet and rocky the entire way as you slowly move deeper into what the Mayans called Xibalba, or the underworld. This is where the Mayans believed the dead went before working their way back up through various levels to reach a better place. Xibalba was both feared and revered. Archaeologists believe that only a select few of the living Mayans ever entered caves and they did so only when necessary to perform rituals and ceremonies designed to solve problems. The bigger the problem, the deeper they went into the underworld.

Mayan ceremonial sites inside the ATM cave, and other ceremonial caves, exist on natural shelves in the interior of the cave system. Here the Mayans built fires, burned incense and lit torches, which cast shadows in the shapes of various gods (some carved out of pillars formed in the cave). They also brought in special ceremonial pots which were cracked or punctured with what’s called a “kill hole” to release their inner spirits and render the vessel useless after use. Pottery shards and punctured pots are scattered all over ATM cave.

After about an hour of walking more or less a mile into the three-mile long cave you reach a boulder on the cave floor. After scrambling up it you enter an expansive open area on a huge ledge. This is the Cathedral, and it’s an ancient offering site littered with dramatic artifacts. The artifacts and the cave environment here are so fragile that you have to take your shoes off and proceed with just socks on through this section of the cave that winds around the fire sites and ritually-arranged pots. The most dramatic artifacts here are the human remains, including the so-called Crystal Maiden, the only intact skeleton found in the Cathedral whose bones sparkle due to to mineral reactions over the years. Indagare members can contact our bookings to team to arrange a day trip.