Isla Holbox: electric island

Address: Ser CasaSandra, Calle Igualdad, Costado De Sec Tec,
77310, Isla Holbox
Telephone: +52 998 120 7061
Website: casasandra.com
Prices: Doubles from about £190

CASA LAS TORTUGAS

The whitewashed first-floor, beach-view suites are the ones to book; in-house Mandarina restaurant and sushi bar is superb and Luuma, next door, is the island’s hottest spot for tapas.

Address: Casa Las Tortugas, Calle Igualdad, 77310, Isla Holbox
Telephone: +52 984 875 2129
Website: holboxcasalastortugas.com
Prices: Doubles from about £155

HOTEL LAS NUBES HOLBOX

Situated at one end of the beach, this is a fairly grand hotel by Holbox standards - it's laid out to feel like a series of tree houses - and is popular with American visitors. The excellent spa smells of fresh mint and aloe vera, grown in the garden and used in treatments.

Address: Hotel Las Nubes, Paseo Kuka, Holbox Island, 77310 Holbox Island, Q.R., Mexico
Telephone: +52 984 875 2300
Website: hotellasnubesdeholbox.com
Prices: Doubles from about £278

The best restaurants in Isla Holbox

EL SUSHI

The hours-fresh snapper, lobster and shrimp sashimi at this ingenious little spot have all been given a Mexican twist. Start with a Margarita with habanero chillies ground into the salt on the rim.

Address: El Sushi de Holbox, Calle Tiburón Ballena, 77310 Holbox, Q.R., Mexico
Telephone: +52 984 875 2192

CHRISS MOSS ON ISLA HOLBOX

I hear the flamingos before I turn and look up to see them: seven, pink and white against the dawn blue, gently gliding east. Around my feet, slender silver fish drift in orderly shoals, scattering suddenly to send fine spray into the air, alarmed by the pterodactyl-shaped frigatebirds circling above – or by me, wading through the shallows. Then the seabed shifts; in a cloud of white sand, a small, beautiful ray, also white, rises up and takes off for deeper water.

The morning hours on Isla Holbox are otherworldly. There’s the slightest of breezes and the soft light makes the clear, milky-green waters easy on the eye. The beach is almost deserted: a couple of runners, a sea angler preparing kit. The inshore waters are knee-high, with a thin line showing a sandbank, beyond which the sea is darker but still calm, warm, clear, for the teeming, curiously tame, marine life.

So far, so paradisiacal. But returning after an eight-year hiatus, I’m struck by changes on Holbox, a 40km-long sandbar off the Yucatán peninsula’s steamy north coast. A beach runs the entire length of its northern edge. To the south are lush mangroves and crystalline freshwater lagoons, part of the Yum Balam biosphere reserve. Pirates hid here once, Creoles fleeing the Mayan rebellions came at the end of the 19th century. But since then, and for more than 100 years, it’s been a domain of fishermen and their families: these are the real holboxeños. The isle has remained isolated.

Change has come fast, but not too febrile. The main plaza has been enlivened by murals and solid-looking street furniture. As well as the little shacks for fish and tacos, there are now Argentine steakhouses, sushi joints, cocktail bars, cute cafés, new Italians as well as old favourites doing the island’s trademark lobster pizzas. Shops still focus on crafts and this place even has its own skilled luthier (a string-instrument maker). Holbox is bright, bold, makeshift.

Almost all the beachfront hotels follow the Mexican palapa standard of thatched roofs and adobe walls. But just-opened Punta Caliza, where I spend my first couple of nights, subtly bucks the trend. One block inland, the 12-bedroom property has proportions sensitively scaled to the tiny islet. And when I turn left off the shady reception I see its inner secret: the entirety of the triangular courtyard is a lime-green swimming pool. The water, which laps up to the doors of the rooms, cools the interior of the building and invites post-beach dips.

The Muñoz family decided to move to the island from Tabasco around the time of my last visit. Son Cuauhtémoc (27) and daughter Claudia (24) run Punta Caliza day to day, and Claudia was also behind the design concept. ‘I was studying architecture at Guadalajara’s Jesuit University and I decided to have a competition, inviting my professors to submit designs,’ she says, playing down the originality of the approach. ‘It was important to my dad to make use of a sustainable red cedar forest he planted in Tabasco some years ago. Two young architects at the Estudio Macías Peredo came up with a plan which did that.’ The geometric lines and the stucco, which uses limestone and the red bark of the chukun tree, are Mayan. Mangrove provides a natural façade. On the beach side of Punta Caliza is a near-empty lot, but the beach road and most of the adjoining blocks are occupied. ‘Holbox is changing, and sooner or later someone will build next door,’ says Claudia. ‘So we wanted the main focus to be on the inside, not on the sea view or how it looks from the exterior.’

I am invited for dinner with the family – the father is also called Cuauhtémoc, after the last Aztec emperor – and their friends. Chef Ricardo Soancatl whisks up lobster tail, octopus ceviche, and avocado and coconut ice cream. We drink white wines from Baja’s Valle de Guadalupe.

Everything on Holbox is close – only 5km or so are inhabited. I get around the sandy streets on foot or by bicycle. It takes only a couple of days to meet just about everyone. The luthier, Don Víctor, decamped to Holbox from Mexico City when a Stradivarius he was looking after was stolen. It stressed him out too much. He spends his mornings fishing and is said to own just two shirts and two pairs of trousers. He teaches English to children at Casa de la Cultura and gives guitar lessons – though students have to make their own guitar first.

I soon figure out the beach tribes. Young fishermen hang out at the open-air beer bars to the west. Close by are Mexican couples, sucking on ice-cold Dos Equis and Tecate. European and American travellers waft along in white linen, or do yoga, before heading for smoky mezcals at Bar Arena or sublime sashimi at Casa Las Tortugas’ rustic bar – both rooftop hotspots with dusk breezes and views over the mangrove-fringed township. Workers unwinding favour the buzzy Hot Corner.

One person’s limitation is another’s luxury. Wi-Fi is patchy on Holbox. Like most visitors, I stop bothering after a couple of days. There are hardly any cars – trucks are allowed on to collect rubbish and deliver drinks – and no jet-skis, no water-bananas, no speedboats. Live music ends at midnight. A single band plays all the island’s gigs; occasionally I catch Latin swing, lusty rancheras or cumbia drifting from one of the beach clubs, but there’s calm just a few feet beyond. Holbox is polite, considerate, anything but brash.

Around 1,000 people live here permanently. On any day during peak season – June to September and Christmas – there might be a similar number of incomers. This place has to work to preserve its character – its Mexicanidad. Approaching the plaza, I’m reassured when I see a grinning skull atop a pink ballgown promoting a hacienda. A moment later, a man runs past carrying a full-size skeleton – this one got up as a pirate. Gentrify all you like, but la muerte remains indigenous; you’ve got to laugh when the end is nigh.

Islanders take downtime very seriously. When a large family has a fiesta, the local school might close for the day. It’s an addictive ethos. For several mornings I stick to a routine that barely alters. I swim in the lull before breakfast, content to watch everyone else take off on diving and fishing trips. Breakfast is granola and zingy juices or carby chilaquiles with tomatillos, cheese, frijoles and egg. As the day heats up, I retreat to a thatched lounger at Casa Las Tortugas to read, write, siesta and work my way through the cocktail menu, discovering aged tequila goes best with fresh cinnamon and grapefruit. Evenings are lazily social: more drinks, ceviche on the sand at Punta Coco, refined suppers of tenderloin and Yucatec-style snapper at CasaSandra.

One morning I go kayaking with Buenos Aires-born Johnny, paddling deep into the mangroves to see herons, ospreys and crocodiles darting into channels full of catfish. We’re completely alone. ‘I send my family pictures of this, but they don’t get it,’ Johnny tells me. ‘They probably think it’s just another Caribbean island, a beach and blue sea.’ But Holbox isn’t that: it’s a sanctuary, a biodiversity hotspot, still unsullied, untamed.

Don Carmelo sails me two hours east of Holbox, where the Gulf meets the darker, cooler Caribbean Sea. This is where whale sharks – which islanders call dominos for their spotted markings – come to feed on plankton. Even with other boats and snorkellers bobbing around, the sudden sight – and proximity – of a 10-metre fish is a solemn moment.

Carmelo, a third-generation fisherman and true holboxeño, tells me how the island is taking control of its affairs. ‘My grandfather saw dominos every day, but never thought much of them. They’d be harpooned by accident, as the spots make them look like tiger sharks. Now we know they have a value. There are too many boats, but at least it’s orderly. Any more building has to proceed likewise. We accept development, even further along the island, but it must be careful and low impact.’

In the open sea I swim beside six or seven whale sharks. At a lonely inshore cape I dive with huge rays, a turtle, a nurse shark on the prowl, barracuda, angelfish and parrotfish. The sea is mirror-flat and all this life – all the commotion – lies below.

Finally, at the end of the day, I catch up with the flamingos, spread out along the sandbank, dancing to free up food from the powdery seabed. The distant vision of these pink giants is saturated by the late-afternoon light. Behind is Holbox, a wobbly mirage in the heat haze, not quite real, not quite there.

Originally published in the October 2018 issue of Condè Nast Traveller

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In 2015, Antonia Quirke visited Isla Holbox, and found a curiously named Mexican isle of shamans and storytellers

Electricity only arrived on Mexico's Isla Holbox recently, and its barefoot shores are still as lo-fi as a box of frogs

Isla Holbox lies about 12km across the water from the dog-eared port of Chiquilá on the northern tip of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, separated from the mainland by a flamingo-dotted lagoon. It's only a kilometre and a half wide and about 40km long (and with a population of around 2,000); nobody seems certain of its precise dimensions as its geography was altered during Hurricane Wilma in 2005. And yet this confusion merely adds to the island's mysterious vibrations. Over on the mainland people speak of it wistfully, as though it might only exist in the mind.

Struggling along potholed highways from Cancún to the coast to catch a boat to the island, I pass shabby jungle villages with shacks selling old tyres strung up to be inspected like dead chickens. Gaggles of Indian schoolgirls in knee-length white socks buy mottled tangerines and delicious cornbread from women cooking on braziers at the side of the road, its smell so acridly sweet it reminds me of my grandmother's perfumed drawer-liners. It comes off the pan in massive, lardy crusts. 'Where are you going?' the girls hoot, with gusts of pre-teen curiosity, as piglets truffle about our feet.

In the 18th century, pirates came to Holbox to rest and draw fresh water from the lagoon on the nearby islet of Yalahuam. Then Mayans arrived - and possibly runaway Italians, as some islanders are narrow-jawed and wavy-haired. Holding out against social and economic pressures, the island only got electricity in 1987 and you sense the place could still manage without it, that Holbox belongs to another era, to a time of Lupe Vélez movies and steamship travel.

There are few cars and mostly bicycles in the tiny main town - merely homes, and shops selling fresh coconut oil, chia seeds and talcum powder. Delicately embroidered blouses waft next to a butcher's with its meat hanging in a shutter-darkened room. At Super Monkeys mini-market, a picture of a blonde Christ being helped with his cross by devil-faced centurions has overlooked old packets of Halls menthols for years.

Straight off the ferry (fishermen will take you over, too, for a few dollars if you haggle with one who's in the right mood), I drag my bag up the road past friendly lizards eating crumbs in the main square where kids are selling fresh sage and tiny, explosively sweet tomatoes. None of the roads in the town are paved; people here have an almost pathological fear of cement and the traffic and aggro that would follow.

Wherever you are on Holbox, you are just moments from the coral-sand beach that stretches all along its northern perimeter. A delicate cream light punches endlessly up from the sand on the street that trails onto the shoreline, where I pass several sun-bald cabanas and a bar selling a lunch of beer and banana bread. The few cafés and restaurants near the beach are stalked by hens and occasional groggy tourists - generally more Europeans than Americans, but even then not that many. Most come to see the whale sharks that gather 20 minutes from the shore from June to September. They stay at a handful of small hotels and guesthouses dotted along the sand towards distant jungle and mangroves full of - goes the legend - rare insects and jaguar. The only beds on Holbox are in these hotels; everybody else prefers hammocks, which you see tied up during the day in ground-floor bedrooms or in back gardens full of spoilt puppies and clapped-out scooter engines.

Dawn comes on fast with the pinkest feelers of fire. As I push a bike up the beach past defunct wooden dinghies rotting in the sand, I see a few huts piled with nets to be mended. Since the fishermen left at 4am looking for red snapper and bass, all is peaceful, save one other person standing in the water near a fallen-down pier. I don't worry about him for a moment. Uniquely for Mexico, there is very little crime on Holbox and the island's three policemen are generally to be found sitting on a wall unwrapping homemade empanadas from tinfoil.

Which is not to say you won't see something highly unusual on the island. One day I meet a local shaman - young, head shaved like a Tibetan monk - making an offering of flowers and sweets to the sea in thanks for the miracle of tobacco. 'Why tobacco?' I marvel, and he claps his hand against his brow with impatience. 'Because it's a sacred plant!' Removing a small pile from a pouch, he strokes it and arranges it on his palm as though it were episcopal silk. 'People shouldn't just light up and complain, "God, what a day." They should be giving thanks! For the delicious cigarette…'

It's been said that you can feel Mexico before you see it, that its pulses somehow possess the sky. Even the customs form challenges you to be vivid and unusual: any visitor is permitted to bring in 'four fishing rods, a telescope, 25 cigars, one turtle and a small wild bird'. People come to Holbox to flop, to eat beef dripping with tequila, to shed their clothes and put on a relaxed grin like a rajah; but at some point the island throws down the gauntlet and you get up and move.

On a sandy path running parallel to the beach, I cycle badly for half an hour west, filthy now with mud puddles from the recent heavy rains that have bled into waterway-laced sandbanks, past rows of coconut trees studded with the orange husks of fallen fruit. And eventually I pass the painted wooden house where Sabina lives. A handsome Austrian woman who came here with her son in the 1980s and never left, she now sells watermelon juice from her garden, which is hung with beads.

There are several Europeans folded into the community here, Graham Greeneishly, frowningly guarding it - life anywhere else an absurd prospect - and a couple of slightly melancholy Americans too, like characters who wandered out of a Wharton novel, constitutionally incapable of handling the demands of the post-industrial era. They all say the same manner of thing: 'I got here and took off my watch and my glasses and threw them into the sea' or 'I realise whenever I pack to go away that I don't know where my shoes are.'

Pushing through yellow and pink scrub, ankles tolerably scratched, I see a bat falcon hovering over large paw prints that could have been made by the giant sea otters reputed to live around here, so rarely seen they are near-mythic. Moments later, I come to what I've been aiming for: a perfectly silent, virgin beach separated from a distant stretch of mangrove by a narrow river. The Yucatán channel at my feet is mid-calf shallow, warm and infinitely gentle, stretching to a far reef. In effect it is a pellucid paddling pool in which tens of tiny piping plovers feed, trusting and undistracted.

No wonder developers have their hot eyes on this place. For some time there has been as-yet-unresolved talk of the construction of villas and condos on the uninhabited part of the island just over the way. Since the revolution of 1910-20, land in Mexico belongs to those who work on it, and Holbox beach is owned by the fishermen. Some have sold their stretch, others have refused, and a renaissance of support for the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata bubbles through the place ¡Tierra y Libertad! Even the local pedicurist has put Zapata's mustachioed picture in her window. The rumours are wildly various: 'I hear they will be building a road.' Is that not the most sorrowful prophesy you have ever heard? People will come here and drink and fight. People who don't know the rules.

But they are not here yet. Later in the day I stop at a bar with walls covered in prismatic jumbles of Zapata, the Mona Lisa, Diego Rivera and Jesus. Images of smart shoes torn from magazines are Blu-Tacked to a painting of a dachshund gazing longingly at a raccoon. I am here looking for 80-year-old Don Victor, English teacher, instrument maker, and one-time restorer of Camillo Camilli violins at the university in Rome, who has lived on the island for 30 years and is known as the keeper of all stories. He's not here, shrugs the waiter, and points to another café, but I find only empty tables and a tatty copy of Austen's Northanger Abbey in Dutch. I'm tired. The afternoon is soft. Even the onomatopoeic sound of the Indian name of this island - oll-bosh - is like a whisper. Opposite, a lady mends T-shirts, watching a TV soap opera, with the sound very low, featuring what looks like a man in an iron mask begging a woman for love in a house heavy with heraldic devices.

For many years there was no divorce on Holbox. First, in the late 1970s, came Coca-Cola, then electricity, then television, then soap operas, then divorce. Then people stopped going to church and it all went to pot, or so says my forty-something friend Clementino, recalling with a sigh the days when he would eke out the batteries on his radio here and eat by gaslight, a time when in London I was stepping onto the Docklands Light Railway for the first time. Clementino still has his gas lamps, kept in the hope that they will one day be called back into service. But on islands such as this (not that there are many left) you always get the same kind of grumbles: powerful families in control, corruption and the disintegration of morals, furious fishermen. The past, perpetually reshaped and mourned. And yet it remains a paradise.

I could sit here all night. Nobody would stare, or wonder why I was alone. As the last light fades, a woman selling a tooth-raspingly sweet juice made from prickly pear and chaya shows me photographs of a 27lb lobster caught some years ago, and some old postcards of bullfighters. Now candles are set out for supper and the central square fills with the smell of fried pork and orange, homemade tacos, potatoes stewed with sausage, and tilapia in highly spiced cochinita pibil. All sorts of people seem to emerge from nowhere - French, English, Argentinian - the town filling like a lighted jewellery box, music starting up, birds hopping from coconut trees to tables, flowers and fresh herbs sold from baskets for a pittance.

Eventually I go looking for Don Victor at the cultural centre opposite the kindergarten, but it's closed; through the glass I see a box full of donated Christmas-carol books spilling onto back issues of Time. But I think I hear him upstairs, and find him telling stories to a group of adults and children. It is the most genial fantasy of schooling imaginable: 12 people sitting on chairs in a bright room built with charity money. For the next hour we are drugged by his stories about the Mayans sacrificing their virgins; the burning of Aztec temples and heaping caskets of human hearts; lapis and coral kept for kings; Spanish galleons and drowned cargoes of pearls; how Holbox once boasted swimming pools made entirely of jade, where a great prince took his prettiest wives swimming, and the pirate Francisco de Molas brought a slave with a gigantic head who strode two metres tall.

A little girl wearing a tassel-swinging blue blouse fiddles at the coloured ribbon twisted into her shiny black hair, smiling to herself at the bits of the stories that please her most. She is too shy to look at me, but I can feel her eyes whenever I turn away. All of them want to try out their English, to ask questions. 'What do the Londoners think of Mexico?' asks a teenage boy. 'Colourful,' I decide, 'Exciting and dangerous'. He pretends to shoot me with an imaginary gun, then laughs brilliantly, thrilling us with his joke. The children show me a mandolin they have been making from the wood of an old coffin, with strings of fishing line. It is a beautiful thing, highly polished, strange and irreplaceable, rendered sorcerous when Don Victor plays a few bars of a Bach cello suite on it, while promising to one day make a whole orchestra of instruments shaped like creatures from the sea.

'They must learn English,' Don Victor sighs, 'or they get screwed.' We walk to a bar after class. 'They have to go to the mainland for school from the age of nine. They're so scared, they have to face the city and wear shoes. So many of them come back defeated.' It's a stunningly dark night, just the sound of sea pouring nearby. He tells me about how he had come here from Mexico City and raised his little daughter alone, teaching her to dive for lobster before she could properly walk. And then he retells my favourite story about Hurricane Wilma, where Holbox was in the eye of the storm for four hours, bright-grey and deathly quiet except for a constant ambient moan. Don Victor remembers looking down the street and seeing two drunken sailors hurrying a crate of beer to safety. He watched, amazed, as they were both suddenly swept sharply into the air, never to be seen again. Picking his way home two days later, he found an octopus stuck to his door and the streets covered in shrimp.

As I walk back to my room, the sand throws up a shimmer to the stars like a glazed tile. It's not so much a dislike of the outside world that unites people here - nothing so negative - just a quiet puzzlement that anybody could choose to live in a more crowded place, prone to sickness and noise, rather than on a tender island that provides all the food and shelter a person could need.

When I leave, a few days later, it starts to rain down by the ferry, and the six passengers - all women, some with produce to sell in Chiquilá, others visiting family - shelter under a gigantic shroud-like tarpaulin. Hugger-mugger, we gird our loins for the battering boat ride ahead and the cities and markets beyond. A young islander next to me feeds her month-old baby. The infant never wakes despite the astonishing thunder and the water that rushes over us as though from hills to the plain. The sea fizzes. We wait it out, listening to an elderly woman talking in a low voice about the bread she once made here from the eggs of turtles.

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