Chenalhó

Chenalhó is the seat of the municipality of the same name, in the Chiapas Highlands at roughly 1,615 metres. The name is Tsotsil and means “water of the cave”. In 2020 the town had 4,369 residents, about 96 percent of them indigenous, and it is the biggest of 145 localities in a municipality of 47,371 people; Polhó (2,176) and Belisario Domínguez (1,636) come next. The municipality was created on 8 May 1935 and shares borders with Chamula, Mitontic, Pantelhó, Chalchihuitán, Larráinzar, Aldama, Tenejapa and Cancuc.

The land is steep sierra, about 90 percent of it very rugged, covered in pine-oak forest and soaked by 2,000 to 3,000 mm of rain a year, so pack a jacket and rain gear. Chenalhó Tsotsil is counted as its own variety of the language. The Catholic parish in the seat is San Pedro Apóstol, part of the diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

This is a working community, not a place set up for tourists: you come for the centre, the church and the mountain scenery. The municipality also carries a painful recent history that visitors should know about. In Acteal, inside the municipality, 45 Tsotsil people were killed on 22 December 1997; a boundary dispute with Chalchihuitán displaced thousands of people from 2017; and in September 2022 about 200 people from Santa Martha fled another armed land conflict. Checking conditions before you travel is part of the trip.