Qualla: Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar

Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Frans Blom's friends in the jungle called him Pancho Bolom - Pancho the Jaguar. It was a compliment that carried weight among people who considered the jaguar sacred. When the Danish archaeologist and his wife, Swiss-German journalist and photographer Gertrude Duby, bought a crumbling neoclassical building on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas in 1950, they named it Casa Na Bolom - House of the Jaguar - a bilingual pun in Spanish and Mayan that doubled as a play on their own surname. The building, originally constructed in 1891 as a seminary, became something no one could have predicted: part museum, part hotel, part research library, part rainforest advocacy center, and always, above all else, a home where the Lacandon Maya were welcome.

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar: Two Outsiders in the Lacandon Jungle

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. They found each other in the forest. Frans Blom, born in Copenhagen in 1893, was one of the first archaeologists to excavate Palenque, the great Mayan city roughly 150 kilometers east of San Cristobal de las Casas. Gertrude Duby, born in Switzerland in 1901, had come to Chiapas t...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar: Dinner in Three Languages

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Frans Blom dreamed of Na Bolom as a cultural and academic center from the beginning. He opened his personal library - an exceptional collection of books on Mayan culture - to the public. Mayan artifacts filled display cases alongside Trudi's documentary photographs. To fund their...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar: Trudi's Trees and Trudi's Burden

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Éclusette, CC BY 3.0. Frans died in 1963, and Trudi carried Na Bolom alone for three more decades. She became an environmental activist in the 1970s, alarmed by the accelerating destruction of the Lacandon jungle she had spent her professional life documenting. In 1975 she established El Vivero, a tre...

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Image: Éclusette | CC BY 3.0

Casa Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar: A Stone Jaguar Still Guards the Door

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leogeograph, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk up to the front entrance of Casa Na Bolom and you will find the guardian Frans installed there: an ancient stone jaguar carved from a Mayan frieze, its features worn smooth by centuries but its presence unmistakable. Behind that door, the house operates much as the Bloms int...

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Image: Leogeograph | CC BY-SA 3.0