Dive site · cave · The Quintana Roo cenotes
🇲🇽 Cenote Naharón (Cristal)
Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico · part of Sistema Ox Bel Ha
The dark cave — tannic water, black walls, no natural light — and the place where one of the oldest human skeletons in the Americas was found.
- Dives here
- 3
- Deepest
- 21.9 m
- Water
- fresh
- First · last
- 2022 · 2026
- Position
- 20.2003, -87.5006
- Getting in
- Turn off MEX 307 here; the site is about 0.4 km further on an unpaved track. (20.1948, -87.5132)
- Also known as
- Cristal · Naharon · Naharon (Cristal) · Najaron
Revision 1 · changed 10 Oct 2026
History
- 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
- End of line
- Shoreline
- Jump (no line)
- Unsurveyed
- Depth
- Along the line
Upstream guidelines of Cenote Naharón (Cristal), traced from the cave-ha.com Naharón cave lines map, which draws the lines over the 1988-89 survey by J. G. Coke and T. M. Young (AMCS); the survey's feet scale bar sets the scale and north is up. The line starts at the pool (dashed, not surveyed) and runs north as the Main Line; Chac's Room is about 518 m in, the O.T. Loop and Caballos de Fuego beyond (p.2500 ft = 762 m); the Halo-line, P.T. Connector, Dutch Connection and Jump Side are cross-links between it and the western line to the Double Domes and Hidden Gemelo. Two jumps south lead through the Southwestern Sacbe (west to the Trifurcate) and the Southern Sacbe, which runs south past the highway toward Mayan Blue (2300 ft = 701 m). Jump positions follow the cave-ha drawing and are approximate; the pool outline is from OpenStreetMap, and depths are the survey's floor depths in feet converted to metres. Positions are approximate, typically within 10 m. The survey's magnetic north arrow is within about 3 degrees of grid north and the highway runs at 70 degrees, as in OSM.
Signposted as Cenote Cristal, known to cave divers as Naharón, and universally described as the dark cave. The water carries so much tannin off the surrounding marsh that the walls absorb rather than reflect your light; there are no white limestone surfaces to bounce off, and the passage swallows illumination in a way that unnerves people the first time.
Like Mayan Blue, it was part of Sistema Naranjal until 28 March 2011, when the Naranjal–Ox Bel Ha connection folded it into Sistema Ox Bel Ha.
Eve of Naharón
In the Naharón section of the cave, divers found the skeleton of a woman aged between twenty and twenty-five. Radiocarbon dating put her at around 13 600 years old, which makes her one of the oldest documented human remains in the Americas and considerably older than the Clovis horizon that used to bound the peopling of the continent.
She was not drowned. When she died the cave was dry — sea level was more than a hundred metres lower, the passage was air-filled, and people used these caves for water, shelter and burial. The sea came up and flooded her where she lay, which is the only reason she survived at all.
Three dives, February 2022 to February 2026, to 21.9 m; the longest ran 133 minutes.
Dived here with
Nearby sites
3 dives at Cenote Naharón (Cristal)
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 | 3 |
| March | no dives | 0 |
| 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 |
- 18 Feb 2026 with Martijn, Xavier date18 Feb 2026 depth21.9 m time133 min water25 °C
- 10 Feb 2022 with Andrea, Benjamin, Mauro date10 Feb 2022 depth18.9 m time130 min water25 °C
- 10 Feb 2022 with Andrea, Benjamin, Mauro date10 Feb 2022 depth20.6 m time76 min water25 °C