Sumidero Canyon
Cañón del Sumidero
Interesting facts
- The canyon was long thought impassable; several early expeditions ended in death, and the first full traverse came only on 31 March 1960, by an army team.
- A group of Frenchmen drowned trying to explore the canyon in the nineteenth century, and a Spanish explorer vanished on a solo attempt in 1959.
- At the canyon's downstream end stands the Chicoasén dam, built between 1974 and 1980 and one of the most powerful hydroelectric plants in Mexico.
- Hidden in the walls are the Cave of Colours and the Cave of Silence, and a stalactite formation known as the Little Seahorse.
- Surveys have recorded about 195 bird species in the park, including the great curassow and the king vulture, alongside ocelots and jaguarundis.
- About two dozen archaeological sites lie within the park, among them a fortified ruin named Berlin after the archaeologist Heinrich Berlin, who studied it in 1946.
- Chiapas protected the canyon as a state ecological reserve in 1972, eight years before it became a federal national park.
- The Grijalva River that carved the gorge rises in Guatemala's Cuchumatanes mountains and runs about 766 kilometres to the Gulf of Mexico.
- The canyon is the second most visited site in Chiapas, surpassed only by the Maya city of Palenque.
Why it is worth it
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. The river opened its way along fractures in the Earth's crust, beginning around 35 million years ago, and the canyon twists as it goes, at times turning almost at right angles while the walls close in. It has been a national park since 1980, protecting more than 21,000 hectares between the Belisario Domínguez bridge near Chiapa de Corzo and the Chicoasén dam, and its wetlands have been listed under the Ramsar Convention since 2004.
Most people see it from a boat. Launches run upstream from the old colonial town of Chiapa de Corzo, and the cliffs grow taller with every bend until the sky becomes a strip overhead. Crocodiles bask on the narrow banks, spider monkeys move through the trees clinging to the rock. The most striking single sight is the Árbol de Navidad, a tall waterfall that spills over a cone of rock and vegetation jutting from the cliff, so that the whole thing looks like a giant Christmas tree hung on the canyon wall; in the rainy season, when the flow is strongest, it seems to sparkle. From the other side of the canyon, a road from Tuxtla Gutiérrez climbs to a chain of lookouts along the rim, where the river appears as a thin green thread far below.
The canyon also carries the memory of the Spanish conquest. Tradition in Chiapas holds that in the 1520s many of the Chiapanec people, rather than submit to the conquerors, threw themselves from the heights of the Peñón de Tepetchía into the river. The canyon's silhouette went on to appear in the colonial coat of arms granted to the city of San Cristóbal in 1535, which later became the arms of the state of Chiapas.
Getting there
The canyon begins on the edge of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, about 10 km away; boat trips leave from the riverside at Chiapa de Corzo, just to the east, and the rim lookouts are reached by road from Tuxtla. The nearest airport is Ángel Albino Corzo International (TGZ), about 33 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sumidero Canyon is a deep natural canyon located just north of the city of Chiapa de Corzo in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. The canyon's creation began around the same time as the Grand Canyon in the U.S. state of Arizona, by a crack in the area's crust and subsequent erosion by the Grijalva River, which still runs through it. Sumidero Canyon has vertical walls which reach as high as 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), with the river turning up to 90 degrees during the 13-kilometre (8 mi) length of the narrow passage.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
16.84833, -93.10556per Wikidata