El Mirador
An ancient city in the middle of an ancient park
David Fort
Winter is the dry season in Guatemala, which makes it possible to trek through the country’s last pristine forest to the ancient city of El Mirador. It just so happened that I found myself bumming around the northern Guatemalan community of Flores, trying to set myself apart from my backpacking peers. I had been reading about El Mirador since arriving and was determined to get to the farthest reaches of the country.
Most tourist agencies are unfamiliar with the ancient city, which has only generated interest in the last 30 years. An extended amount of research was required on my part to find a way to get there.
I first enquired at CONAP Guatemala (The National Protected Areas Council), a government agency responsible for the country’s system of protected areas and the management of its flora and fauna. I researched diligently hoping to find more information on how to travel to the largest city in the ancient Mayan kingdom (at 16 kilometres squared, it was once home to tens of thousands of people).
It was in the middle of tourist season and during one of the overpriced rides to the excavated temples of Tikal that a quiet, inviting office caught my attention.
There, I was told that there were no formal expeditions to the sight in the near future except for one, by an environmental group called Tropico Verde. They were going in hopes of protecting not only the ancient city, but the surrounding park as well.
There are many immediate threats to the park, ranging from logging activity surrounding the park to proposed highways that would open the door to large scale tourism and oil exploration. If forestry activities in the surrounding area prove to be unsustainable, it is possible that logging could return to the protected areas of the Maya Biosphere reserve, including the El Mirador-Rio Azul park system.
Many proposals to open the park to large-scale tourism have been made. None of the proposals include any research about the potential effects of 100,000 people visiting annually. These plans include a highway, airstrip and archaeological excavation in the area. Local communities objected to any plan that did not acknowledge their rights to use the forest or that provided vague information at best.
Recently, strong local and international opposition campaigns pressured the Guatemalan government and Ministry of Energy and Mining into backing off momentarily.
After a few days of determined pestering, Tropico Verde decided I would be a worthy addition to the expedition, as I have worked for an environmental organization in Canada and may be able to relay information of their campaign to Canada. The group’s actions receive little media coverage in its own country.
El Mirador is roughly 65 kilometres north of Guatemala’s most northern community and four kilometres south of the roadless Mexican border. Trees fortify the city deep within the protected El Mirador-Rio Azul National Park system. The park has an area of 116,911 hectares and is surrounded by the multiple use zones of the Maya Biosphere reserve.
This area of moist, broad-leafed forest and flooded grassland is home to many endemic and endangered flora and fauna. Threatened species in this region include the tapir, the jaguar, the margay (a type of leopard) and the mealy Amazon parrot.
Ticks were plentiful and almost microscopic, one of a host of insects, spiders and plant life to which I had never been subjected. We slept in hammocks with bug nets over us, listening to the tarantulas hunt and howler monkeys scream — the jungle’s lullaby.
We met our guides and mules in Carmelita, a very small village populated with chicle tree extractors and small-scale food growers. (Chicle is the latex of “Chicozapote,” or the Sapodilla tree, that is used as the natural base for chewing gum). We packed the mules and our guides led us on our way.
