Coverage / Belize
Belize
Central America
The only English-speaking country in Central America, set between Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea. Belize pairs the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere, a UNESCO World Heritage site with the Great Blue Hole at its heart, with dense jungle, Maya ruins and river caves inland, and a coastal Garifuna and Creole culture found nowhere else.
5 activities · 7 pairings · 12 verified providers
What you can do in Belize
Scuba Diving
- Ambergris CayeFeb Mar Apr May Jun Jul AugAmbergris Caye is where most people first put their head underwater in Belize, and for good reason. The barrier reef runs a few hundred metres off San Pedro, and the Hol Chan Marine Reserve protects a cut through it that concentrates fish in extraordinary numbers. A single tank at Hol Chan puts you among green moray eels, southern stingrays, Nassau grouper, schooling snapper and spotted eagle rays, while the neighbouring Shark Ray Alley draws nurse sharks and rays into the shallows. It is reef diving you can do on your first open-water certification, with warm water and easy conditions, and the same shops run the deeper trips to Turneffe Atoll and the Blue Hole once you are ready to go further.
- Great Blue HoleFeb Mar Apr May JunThe Great Blue Hole is the dive on almost every Caribbean bucket list, a collapsed limestone cave that flooded as the seas rose after the last ice age and now drops as a dark blue circle through the reef. Jacques Cousteau charted it from the Calypso in 1971 and ranked it among his finest dives, and the pull is the geology as much as the fish. At around 30 metres the walls give way to enormous stalactites hanging from old cave ceilings, with Caribbean reef sharks and the occasional blacktip and bull shark cruising the gloom. Trips run as full-day, three-tank outings from Ambergris Caye and Caye Caulker that pair the Hole with the wall dives of Half Moon Caye and the Long Caye Aquarium, so a day mixes the deep sinkhole with shallow reef packed with life. It is an advanced dive for the depth and the long crossing, not a place to log your first ocean dives.
Witness / Attend
- Garifuna Settlement DayDangrigaNovGarifuna Settlement Day on 19 November is the defining event of Belize's Caribbean culture, and Dangriga is its heart. It marks the arrival of the Garifuna on Belize's southern shores in the early 1800s, after their exile from the island of St Vincent, first commemorated here by the activist Thomas Vincent Ramos in 1941 and made a national public holiday in 1977. The day peaks at dawn, when crowds gather on the beach to watch a reenactment of the landing: dugout boats come ashore carrying cassava, plantains and drummers, met by singing and the deep pulse of Garifuna drums. What follows is a day of street parades, punta dancing, church services and family feasts of hudut and cassava bread. There is no ticket and no single organiser. You come to Dangriga, join the crowd on the sand before sunrise, and move with the town through the day.
- San IgnacioJan Feb Mar Apr May DecActun Tunichil Muknal, the ATM cave, is one of the great archaeological experiences anywhere, and the single most extraordinary thing you can do in Belize. The trip starts with a jungle hike and three river crossings, then you swim into the mouth of the cave and wade and scramble upstream in the dark for about an hour. Deep inside, the Maya left the traces of sacrificial rituals: ceramic pots, offerings and around fourteen human skeletons calcified into the cave floor, the most famous a young adult now called the Crystal Maiden, glittering where minerals have crystallised over the bones. It has been closed to cameras since 2012, after a tourist dropped one on a skull, so you carry nothing and simply look. Only a handful of guides hold Institute of Archaeology permits to lead it, and groups are small. This is Witness in its fullest sense, standing inside an undisturbed Maya underworld.
Best months at a glance
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