Dive site · cave · The Quintana Roo cenotes
🇲🇽 Cenote Mayan Blue (Escondido)
Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico · part of Sistema Ox Bel Ha
The most-dived cenote in this log — twenty-one dives — and an entrance to Ox Bel Ha, the longest underwater cave in the world at nearly 500 km.
- Dives here
- 21
- Deepest
- 23.8 m
- Water
- fresh · halocline at 18 m
- First · last
- 2022 · 2026
- Position
- 20.1942, -87.4961
- Getting in
- Turn off MEX 307 here; the site is about 0.3 km further on an unpaved track. (20.1983, -87.5029)
- Also known as
- Mayan blue
Revision 2 · changed 18 Oct 2026
History
- r2 18 Oct 2026 Log titles removed from the aliases · Dennis Bakhuis
- r1 10 Oct 2026 Imported from the personal log · Dennis Bakhuis
Site data © divelog-sites contributors (ODbL), descriptions and maps CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf
1 map
- Entrance
- T
- Jump
- Restriction
- End of line
- Shoreline
- Jump (no line)
- Depth
- Along the line
Main guidelines of the Mayan Blue section of Ox Bel Ha, traced from the hand-drawn Mayan Blue line map (Coke, Conlin and Young; the version published by cave-ha.com and the two scans in the owner's vault); lines follow the dashed guidelines where legible and the passage centre elsewhere. Scale and north come from the 1990-92 QRSS survey (J. G. Coke IV, AMCS Activities Newsletter 24), matched on the Battleship Room pit, the loop north of the highway and the Cenote of the Sun; the cenote outline is from OpenStreetMap. Depths are the floor depths of the source in feet, converted to metres; the halocline is at about 18 m. The A tunnel runs north-west to the Battleship Room and on toward Cenote Naharón (854 m per the map); the E tunnel meets the B tunnel with a short jump about 244 m in; the Dead Zone leaves the B tunnel and continues to the Time Tunnel and south past the Lost Cenote to the Ballcourt, Cenote of the Sun and on toward Muknal. Many side passages and knotted-line extensions of the survey are left out; positions are approximate (a few metres to about 15 m). Scale and north check out against OpenStreetMap: the highway sits about 660 m north of the cenote on the sheet and in OSM, and Maya's Two and Lost Cenote fall within about 50 m of their OSM points.
The system
Mayan Blue, also called Escondido, opens into what was for years mapped as Sistema Naranjal. On 28 March 2011 Steve Bogaerts, supported by Bil Phillips, made the connection that joined Naranjal to Sistema Ox Bel Ha — three paths of water in Maya — and Naranjal stopped being a system in its own right.
Ox Bel Ha is the largest of them all: 496.8 km surveyed as of January 2023, more than 160 cenote entrances, over 56 000 survey stations, 2 500 jumps and 1 500 T-intersections. It was first entered in 1996. Everything in this file sits inside that.
The cave
The water above the halocline is stained dark by tannin from the surrounding jungle, and the walls carry the stain in a band that marks where the fresh water sits. The halocline itself is at about 18 m. Below it the water is clear salt.
The good tunnels are B, E and F, all mostly in salt water. The Battleship Room is the set piece. Three jumps from the main line get you across to Cenote Naharón; downstream connects to Cenote Sun.
The dives
Twenty-one dives between February 2022 and February 2026 — more than any other site in Mexico and more than any site outside the Netherlands and Germany. The first of them were the Cave 2 course in February 2022; the rest are the kind of repeat visits you only make to a cave you are working through systematically. Deepest 23.8 m, longest 100 minutes.
Dived here with
Nearby sites
21 dives at Cenote Mayan Blue (Escondido)
Dives per year
Water temperature by month
Mean water temperature in °C; an empty month had no dives.
| Month | Mean | Dives |
|---|---|---|
| January | no dives | 0 |
| February | 25.0 °C | 14 |
| March | 25.0 °C | 7 |
| April | no dives | 0 |
| May | no dives | 0 |
| June | no dives | 0 |
| July | no dives | 0 |
| August | no dives | 0 |
| September | no dives | 0 |
| October | no dives | 0 |
| November | no dives | 0 |
| December | no dives | 0 |
- Mayan Blue Two 7 Feb 2026 · with Kim date7 Feb 2026 depth19.6 m time36 min water25 °C
- open water (rescue exercise) 11 Feb 2022 · with Andrea, Benjamin, Mauro date11 Feb 2022 depth5.3 m time28 min water25 °C
- B-tunnel → A-tunnel 11 Feb 2022 · with Andrea, Benjamin, Mauro date11 Feb 2022 depth22 m time90 min water25 °C
- 8 Feb 2022 with Andrea, Benjamin, Mauro date8 Feb 2022 depth5.2 m time22 min water25 °C