Qualla: Lacandon Jungle

Lacandon Jungle: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Natura Mexicana, Public domain. Local lore says the gods lived here when they still walked the earth. The Lacandon Jungle -- Selva Lacandona -- sprawls across 1.9 million hectares of southeastern Chiapas and into northern Guatemala, a canopy so dense and continuous that the Usumacinta River, Mexico's largest by volume and the seventh largest in the world, can vanish beneath the green when seen from above. One quarter of all Mexico's species diversity is packed into this single forest. It shelters 1,500 tree species, a third of the country's birds, more than half its diurnal butterflies, and archaeological ruins that have been accumulating since the Classic Maya period over a thousand years ago.

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Image: Natura Mexicana | Public domain

Lacandon Jungle: Temples in the Canopy

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thelmadatter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Palenque sits at the jungle's northwestern edge, where the Eastern Mountains meet the Gulf Coast Plains. Its Temple of Inscriptions, Temple of the Sun, and Temple of the Cross rank among the finest Maya architecture ever built, yet only a fraction of the site has been excavated. ...

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Image: Thelmadatter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lacandon Jungle: The People the Forest Kept Hidden

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LarissaGomez, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern Lacandon Maya number somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people, scattered across roughly a dozen villages including Naja, Lacanja Chansayab, and Metzobok. Their origins are tangled. The original Lakandon Ch'ol -- a Cholan-speaking people who lived along tributaries of the...

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Image: LarissaGomez | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lacandon Jungle: A Forest Burning from the Edges

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ivetamota, CC BY-SA 3.0. Deforestation began in the mid-nineteenth century with loggers and chicleros -- workers who tapped trees for the sap used to make chewing gum. By the 1940s, much of the old-growth forest outside the core had been destroyed. Migration from the overcrowded Chiapas highlands acceler...

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Image: Ivetamota | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lacandon Jungle: Zapatistas, Conservation, and the Fight Over Who Protects What

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lacandon Jungle is a political tinderbox. The EZLN -- the Zapatistas -- and their indigenous allies want to farm reserve land, arguing that indigenous farmers are the forest's best protectors and proposing an "Indian Farmers' Reserve" of interspersed farms and jungle. Interna...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0