The Most Beautiful Places in Chiapas
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Chiapas are Agua Azul Waterfalls, Palenque and Sumidero Canyon. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, is where the highlands of Central America meet the lowland rainforest of the Maya world. Rivers draining the mountains have carved deep canyons and, on the way down through limestone country, built cascades coloured by dissolved minerals. In the humid forests near the Guatemalan border, Classic Maya cities flourished between roughly the third and ninth centuries, and many were swallowed by jungle after they were abandoned, which is why their stone and stucco survived so well.
Palenque is the best known of them: the Temple of the Inscriptions holds the tomb of the ruler Pakal, found sealed inside the pyramid in 1952, and the palace with its tower rises over the forest edge. Yaxchilan, on a bend of the Usumacinta River, is famous for its carved stone lintels showing rulers and ritual, while nearby Bonampak preserves the most complete painted murals of the Maya world, with scenes of court life and battle.
Nature is as strong a draw as the ruins. The Agua Azul Waterfalls tumble in a long series of turquoise pools and limestone steps through the forest. Sumidero Canyon, near Tuxtla Gutiérrez, encloses the Grijalva River between cliffs that rise up to around a kilometre above the water, a sight best taken in by boat. The mix here is distinctive: three ancient cities and two works of water within one state.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agua Azul Waterfalls | Waterfall | |
| 2 | Palenque | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Sumidero Canyon | Canyon | |
| 4 | Yaxchilan | Archaeological site | |
| 5 | Bonampak | Archaeological site |
01 Agua Azul Waterfalls
Cascadas de Agua Azul
Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W
Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them.
Did you know? The area sits in one of Mexico's rainiest zones, where humid winds off the Gulf of Mexico are trapped by the mountain slopes.
02 Palenque
Mexico17.484° N 92.046° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Palenque is the Maya city that most makes you feel the forest pressing in. Its temples of pale limestone sit on a shelf at the foot of the Chiapas hills, with dense green canopy climbing behind them and streams running through the site.
Did you know? The vaulted Otulum aqueduct runs for more than 100 metres underground beneath the main plaza.
03 Sumidero Canyon
Cañón del Sumidero
Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W
Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sumidero Canyon is the gorge of the Grijalva River in central Chiapas, a cleft roughly 13 km long whose walls rise as much as 1,000 m above the water.
Did you know? Hidden in the walls are the Cave of Colours and the Cave of Silence, and a stalactite formation known as the Little Seahorse.
04 Yaxchilan
Yaxchilán
Mexico16.900° N 90.967° W
Jacob Rus · CC BY-SA 2.0 Yaxchilan was built inside a great horseshoe bend of the Usumacinta River, on the frontier between Mexico and Guatemala, so that water protects it on every side except a narrow neck of land to the south.
Did you know? The city's ancient name was probably Pa' Chan, meaning cleft or broken sky, while the modern name Yaxchilan means green stones.
05 Bonampak
Mexico16.704° N 91.065° W
Oleksii0 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bonampak is a modest Maya site in eastern Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, but one building there holds the most complete set of paintings to survive from the Classic Maya world. Structure 1, the Temple of the Murals, is a three-room building 16 metres long and about 7 metres high on a T-shaped platform.
Did you know? Only about a third of the 281 painted figures are named; roughly one in ten has a caption box that was deliberately left blank.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Chiapas?
- On our list, Agua Azul Waterfalls ranks first, followed by Palenque and Sumidero Canyon.
- Why is the water at Agua Azul blue?
- The river carries a high load of dissolved calcium carbonate from the surrounding limestone, which gives the water its turquoise colour and builds the travertine steps the falls cascade over. After heavy rain, sediment can turn the water brown.
- What is special about the Bonampak murals?
- The murals at Bonampak, painted around the end of the eighth century, are the most complete and best preserved Maya wall paintings known, covering three rooms with scenes of ceremony, battle and the treatment of captives.
- Who was Pakal of Palenque?
- K'inich Janaab Pakal was a seventh-century ruler of Palenque who reigned for decades. His tomb, with its carved sarcophagus lid, was discovered inside the Temple of the Inscriptions in 1952.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Chiapas?
- In our collection, the places in Chiapas are most often archaeological sites (3), canyons and gorges (1), waterfalls (1) and nature sanctuaries (1).
- How many places are on this list in Chiapas?
- The list covers 5 places.