Guatemala Guide
The western highlands
Lago de Atitlán
LAGO DE ATITLÁN is astonishingly beautiful, and most people find themselves captivated by the lake's scenic excesses. The effect is so intoxicating that a handful of gringo devotees have been rooted to its shores since the 1960s, and today Atitlán rates as the country's number-one tourist attraction.
Hemmed in on all sides by volcanoes and steep hills, it's at least 320m deep and has no visible outlet, draining through an underground passage to the Pacific coast. The lake measures 18km by 12km at its widest point and shifts through an astonishing range of blues, steely greys and greens as the sun moves across the sky. In the morning the surface of the lake is normally calm and clear, but by early afternoon the xocomil, "the wind that carries away sin", blows from the coast, churning the surface and making travel by boat quite a rock'n'roll experience. A north wind, say the Maya, indicates that the spirit of the lake is discarding a drowned body, having claimed its soul.
Another remarkable aspect of the Atitlán area is the strength of Maya culture evident in its lakeside villages. Despite the holiday homes and the thousands of tourists who venture here each year, many of the pueblos remain intensely traditional – San Antonio Palopó, Santiago Atitlán and Sololáin the hills above the lake, are some of the very few places in the entire country where Maya men still wear traje. Around the southwestern shores, from Santiago to San Pablo La Laguna, the indigenous people are Tz'utujil speakers, and are the remnants of one of the smaller pre-conquest tribes, whose capital was on the slopes of the San Pedro volcano. On the other side of the water, from San Marcos La Laguna to Cerro de Oro, Kaqchikel is spoken, marking the western boundary of this tribe.