Lachuá

Lachuá comes from Q'eqchi' li chu ha, fetid water: the lake smells of sulphur. It is almost round, four square kilometres, two hundred and twenty-two metres deep, a well opened in the limestone at one hundred and seventy-three metres of altitude. That roundness gave rise to the hypothesis of a meteorite crater; geologists read it rather as a cenote, a drowned sinkhole like those of Yucatán, and the debate is not closed. Around it, fourteen thousand three hundred hectares of humid tropical forest in a national park since 1996, and a wetland inscribed under the Ramsar Convention as the Lachuá Ecoregion, fifty-three thousand hectares, since 2006. Fifty-five Q'eqchi' communities live in this ecoregion. Cacao grows at their door, at the edge of what is not cut.