Isla Cerritos

Isla Cerritos is a small, roughly round island about 200 meters across, lying some 500 meters off the north coast of Yucatán and about 5 kilometers west of the fishing port of San Felipe, close to the western mouth of the Ría Lagartos estuary. It belongs to the municipality of San Felipe and sits roughly 90 kilometers due north of Chichén Itzá, a distance that turns out to matter a great deal.

Between 1984 and 1986 a joint project of New College of Florida and INAH, led by archaeologists Anthony Andrews and Tomás Gallareta Negrón and sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society, mapped and test-excavated the island and the shore facing it. They found occupation from the Late Preclassic (around 300 BC) through the Terminal Classic (around AD 1100). At its height the island and Paso del Cerro, the site on the coast opposite, worked as the port of the Itzá capital and controlled the mouth of the estuary, from which salt from the Las Coloradas salt pans was shipped. The island had small plazas with civic-ceremonial buildings and houses, probably of Itzá merchants, retaining walls that doubled as docks, two piers and a breakwater on the south side enclosing a small sheltered harbor, plus an open flat area that may have held a market. The digs turned up pottery typical of Chichén Itzá alongside imports from far away: flint from Belize, obsidian from central Mexico, Michoacán and Guatemala, Guatemalan greenstone, turquoise from northern Mexico or the U.S. Southwest and gold from Costa Rica or Panama.

After about 1200 the island was used only now and then, for fishing camps and rituals, and fishermen kept camping on it through colonial times and the 19th and 20th centuries. On the mainland, a raised footpath crosses the marsh from Paso del Cerro to a petén with a freshwater cenote, remains of a sacbé (Maya road) lead inland, and old salt pans worked until the mid-20th century lie nearby. Today the island is a resting place for seabirds: brown pelicans, magnificent frigatebirds, gulls, terns, cormorants and boobies. San Felipe is proud enough of them to put them on the municipal coat of arms. The ruins are low mounds rather than standing temples, so come for the story, the birds and the boat ride.