Lachuá

Lachuá comes from the Q'eqchi' li chu ha, the foul-smelling water: the lake smells of sulphur. It is almost round, four square kilometres, two hundred and twenty-two metres deep, a shaft open in the limestone at one hundred and seventy-three metres above sea level. This roundness gave rise to the hypothesis of a meteorite crater; geologists read it rather as a cenote, a flooded sinkhole like those of the Yucatán, and the debate is not closed. Around it, a tropical rainforest that has been a national park since 1996, and a wetland listed under the Ramsar Convention as Eco-región Lachuá since 2006. Fifty-five Q'eqchi' communities live in this ecoregion. Cacao grows on their doorstep, on the edge of what is not cut down.

In 1914, on his coffee estate in Cobán, Oscar Majus Kloeffer planted green cardamom from Kerala, to break India's near-monopoly. In 2000, Guatemala became the world's leading producer, and nearly seven tenths of its cardamom comes from Alta Verapaz, from three hundred thousand farms of under four hectares, held for the most part by the children and grandchildren of the mozos colonos bound to the fincas. In Lachuá, cardamom and cacao share the same plot, beneath timber trees, madre de cacao and fruit trees. The associations maintain this agroforestry as a belt around the lake, against industrial oil palm. And on these plots, nearly two point nine metres of rain fall every year.