Cenote Xkeken

Cenote Xkeken lies near the town of Valladolid on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, an underground karst cave cenote formed where limestone bedrock collapsed into a flooded cavity below. The water sits entirely within a domed cave chamber reached by a stairway cut through a narrow opening in the rock, and its surface is lit by a shaft of sunlight entering through a small hole in the cave ceiling, illuminating the mineral-stained stalactites hanging above the pool. Xkeken sits beside a nearby, similarly enclosed cenote, Samula, and both draw on the same porous limestone aquifer that honeycombs the northern Yucatan Peninsula with thousands of comparable sinkholes. This entity documents Cenote Xkeken specifically as a geological formation, an underground karst cave cenote near Valladolid lit by a single natural skylight opening in its ceiling.