Lacanja Chansayab and the Selva Lacandona

Lacanja Chansayab is the largest Lacandon Maya settlement remaining in the Chiapas rainforest, a loose scatter of family compounds bordering the Montes Azules biosphere reserve where roughly 1,500 people still speak Lacandon Maya and several elders continue to wear the traditional white tunic, or xikul. Rather than a single fixed attraction, the community functions as a base camp: family cooperatives run simple palm-roofed cabanas and campsites, cook meals over wood fire, and guide walks along forest trails and the Lacanja river to a series of cascades and swimming pools shaded by rainforest canopy. A short path also leads to the small, largely unrestored ruins of Lacanja itself, a modest Classic Maya site overshadowed by nearby Bonampak but rarely visited on its own. Wildlife sightings are routine rather than exceptional here, with scarlet macaws crossing overhead at dawn and dusk and howler monkeys calling through the canopy at first light. Most visitors treat Lacanja Chansayab as an overnight stop, splitting a day between the river cascades and a guided forest walk, though it also works as a full-day base for visiting Bonampak, only 12 km away, without the long return drive to Palenque. Trails are driest and most comfortable from February to April, before the heaviest rains from June to October turn the forest paths to mud and raise the river level over some of the swimming pools.