Valladolid

About this audio guide

This guide to Cenote Zaci in downtown Valladolid, Yucatan, follows Pemex geophysicist Glen Penfield, who spotted a strange pattern in survey data in nineteen seventy-eight while hunting for oil. It traces how that finding sat forgotten for over a decade before a chance introduction pulled a graduate student, and eventually the wider scientific world, into the same mystery. Along the way it touches the peninsula's ring of collapsed sinkholes and the Maya families who once drew water from this cavern. Listen at the cenote's edge, where stairs cut into the rock lead down to the water.