Isla Holbox

This guide to Isla Holbox off Cancún traces a narrow mangrove sandbar whose Maya name already meant black hole, for its dark lagoon water. It follows the Maya refugees who fled a raid on Yalahau in 1852 to hide here, the pirates said to have used the same shallow waters two centuries earlier, and the tiny fishing community that rebuilt after a hurricane flattened it in 1886. Listen for how a place built for disappearing became home.