CENOTE CAVERN AND CAVE DIVING

Why dive cenotes?

In Mexico’s Riviera Maya, some of the world's best reef diving is just off shore on Cozumel Island. Why spend time diving in dark holes in the ground? Why give up a day of fish-gazing to dive cenotes?

There is more to cenotes than you might think.

•Light Effects

Cavern dives are not completely dark. Sunbeams glow a radiant turquoise and illuminate stalactites inside the cavern. Shafts of light filter through the leafy jungle and burst out tiny holes in ceiling like green laser beams. Thick rays of cobalt blue light strike the water's surface and drive straight to the bottom of the cenote, creating vertical columns of oscillating light sometimes more than 130 ft high.  

•Formations

Stactites and stalagmites reach stone arms towards each other. Thousands of tiny, transparent soda straws grow from ceilings like icicles, and curtains of rock drape entire walls.  Surrounded by water, these formations can no longer grow. They have been effectively frozen in time since the end of the last glacial period. Divers in cenotes see a part of the world exactly as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago.

•Fossils

The cenotes of the Riviera Maya preserve a wide variety of fossils.  In certain caves, certified cave divers can find the remains of pre-historic sloths or mastodons. Many caverns have remnants of the time the Yucatan Peninsula was below sea level, such as fossilized shells, sea urchins, and coral.  Some cenotes even house human remains. 

•Creatures

Shrimp tiptoe through the caverns, plucking up microscopic organisms and waving their antennae about.  Freshwater fish such as catfish, sailfin mollys, and mayan gobies live in the open water, while silvery Tetras cloud around divers’ lamps and follow them into the caverns.  Bizarre looking freshwater eels are sometimes seen swimming past like undulating ribbons. The elusive cave blind fish has evolved to live in the complete darkness: skin covers its eyes as it no longer uses them. 

Why dive cenotes?  WHY NOT? 

To schedule a cenote dive, email info@cenoteland.com 

                                            photo by Jeff Lindsay, 2009

The entrance to a cenote near Kin Ha outside Puerto Morelos.