Lake Atitlán fills the crater of a collapsed supervolcano, its sapphire water reaching 340 metres deep — the deepest lake in Central America. The caldera formed some 84,000 years ago, when the Los Chocoyos eruption blasted out as much as 300 cubic kilometres of ash and the emptied magma chamber caved in; over the millennia three near-perfect cones — San Pedro, Tolimán and Atitlán — rose along its southern shore. Sitting at 1,562 metres in the Guatemalan highlands, the lake so struck the writer Aldous Huxley that he called it Lake Como "with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes," and confessed it was "really too much of a good thing." Its shores belong to the Maya: Tz'utujil and Kaqchikel villages that have kept their languages, dress and weaving for centuries.
Each village turns a different face to the water. Panajachel is the busy gateway; San Marcos draws swimmers who leap from the cliffs of Cerro Tzankujil; San Juan La Laguna is lined with murals and cooperatives where women colour cotton with indigo and cochineal; Santiago Atitlán keeps Maximón, a cigar-smoking folk saint who is part Maya god, part Catholic image. You cross between them in small wooden lanchas that run shore to shore all day, and with each trip the volcanoes swing to a new angle. At dawn the lake lies mirror-still; by afternoon a wind the Kaqchikel call Xocomil — "the wind that carries away sin" — rakes the surface into whitecaps. The lake is restless in a slower way too: with no river to drain it, its level has climbed several metres since 2009, and the rooftops of drowned docks and houses now sit beneath the water.