The word cenote comes from the Mayan tz’onot, meaning “sacred well,” and refers to any one of 10,000 surface entrances to water-filled limestone caves beneath the Mexican states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo.
Divers presently mapping the cenotes between Tulum and Playa del Carmen say all of them are probably interconnected and may one day be recognized as the single most extensive cave system on earth, a title presently held by the 686-kilometer-long Mammoth Cave-Flint Ridge system in the United States.
Canadian forester David Palmer was first introduced to cenotes in 1973 by one of the architects of the Cancun resort area. Fascinated, he later returned with the intention of diving deeper into these mysterious entrances to the underworld.
Says Palmer, “We walked into a bookstore, and lo and behold, it was run by a Canadian couple, and I said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a guidebook to the cenotes, would you?’
“‘No,’ replied owner Nicole Moss, ‘but I wish we did. So many people come in here and ask for one.’
“Now that piqued my interest. So, since we were going around looking at them anyway, we started to keep an account.”
On occasion, Palmer and his wife might spend a month in Mexico visiting two or three cenotes a day.
“We tried to see as many as possible,” he says. “Our aim was to cover the whole peninsula physically and geographically, taking in as many cenotes as we could. Just now we’re at about 140 of the publicly open ones.”
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