El Tren Maya, which links five states in southern Mexico, is one of the country’s most-debated infrastructure projects. Carved through the Yucatán Peninsula at great expense, the 966-mile loop pits the megaproject ambitions of Mexico’s departing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, against the will of environmentalists and Indigenous leaders seeking to preserve a pristine environment of jaguars, ancient ruins and sacred underwater caves.
The route, which partly opened in December and is expected to be in full service this year, includes a stop at Cancún International Airport, the second-busiest airport in Mexico and a gateway for international tourism, making it possible for sightseers to journey quickly from the schlocky pleasures of Señor Frogs to remote cities of the late-classic Maya. Along the way, they might stay over in the likes of Mérida, a city of stately limestone palaces once called the Paris of Mexico, or spend the night en route in private sleeping cabins traveling at nearly 100 miles per hour.
In the 19th century, the British artist and explorer Frederick Catherwood portrayed Uxmal, a gorgeous ancient city with pinkish stone structures, with only a few human figures gracing the landscape. This year, the photographer Matthew Pillsbury traveled the Tren Maya route to document the changing sites along the way, including Uxmal. An archaeologist there told him that thousands of people visit every year now, and that the train is expected to bring millions in the years to come.
Pillsbury has long focused on the ways technology changes our lives. He often uses long exposures to show how some people, marked by long, ghostly shadows, move through their environment and how others stay put. “Often the people who stop,” Pillsbury said, “are themselves in the process of photographing or being photographed.”
One picture that inspired him during his journey was a photo of his great-grandfather ascending an Egyptian pyramid with just a few friends, something that is no longer possible because of the crush of tourism. Pillsbury thought of his own recent experience climbing a temple in a remote site called Edzná, also on the route of El Tren Maya. He saw only three other tourists that day. There is going to be a time, he said, when we are going to have memories of some of these places and think back and say, “That’s crazy that I was at Edzná then, and there was no one else that day.”
On the Route of El Tren Maya
Matthew Pillsbury visited stops from Valladolid to Palanque to Cancún, a circuit of nearly a thousand miles. This is what he saw.
Traveling the Tren Maya loop counterclockwise, starting and ending in Cancún in the northeast, Pillsbury first came to Valladolid, a bustling colonial city. Travelers often stay overnight as they visit sites like Cenote Oxman, one of the thousands of natural sinkholes connected by underground rivers across the Yucatán Peninsula.
One of the “Seven Wonders of the New World,” Chichén Itzá is about 45 minutes by car from Valladolid, the nearest major town. Many tourists take the bus in the early morning from Cancún and back again that same evening — about six hours round-trip. Spectacular ruins like El Castillo, above, have already made it one of Mexico’s most popular tourist destinations.
One legend has the Pyramid of the Magician, in Uxmal, being built overnight by supernatural means. The ancient city, a short drive from Maxcanú, was abandoned after the 10th century A.D. for reasons unknown. The UNESCO World Heritage Convention notes that many of its impressive architectural features remain well preserved because of “the region’s remoteness and sparse population.”
Edzná re-emerged from history slowly, first as a mere mention by the German explorer Teobert Maler in 1887, then in a report by local workers in 1906 and finally by way of a formal investigation by the Mexican archaeologist Nazario Quintana Bello in 1927. On the day Pillsbury visited, he saw only a handful of visitors.
Palenque — in Chiapas, at the southernmost end of a long spur of the Tren Maya loop — is one of the best preserved cities of the Classic Maya era. It first came to the attention of the Spanish in 1567, when a missionary named Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada heard rumors of an abandoned city from the Chol Indians he was attempting to convert.
Rancho Encantado, a low-key hotel on Bacalar Lagoon in Quintana Roo, near Mexico’s border with Belize. The pace of development here has not yet reached the fever pitch of beach towns farther up the Riviera Maya.
Tulum, on the other hand, has quickly developed from a quiet escape from the tourist bustle of Cancún to its own, somewhat higher-dollar major destination. Now the ancient Mayan city is walking distance from a thriving beach scene.
The display over this shop in Playa del Carmen, once a quiet fishing village and now one of Quintana Roo’s biggest cities, is made up of hundreds of little sombreros.
Nicholas Casey is a staff writer for the magazine. He was previously the Madrid bureau chief for The Times and a foreign correspondent based in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Israel. Matthew Pillsbury is an American photographer known for long exposures. He has photographed big cats in Philadelphia and natural cityscapes in Singapore for previous Voyages issues.