Todos Santos Cuchumatán

The road up to Todos Santos Cuchumatán switchbacks so relentlessly out of Huehuetenango that I lost count of the turns somewhere past the second hour, the temperature dropping with every bend until I was digging a fleece out of my bag I hadn’t touched anywhere else in Guatemala. This is Mam Maya territory, high in the Cuchumatanes range, and the men here wear a traje unlike anything else in the country — trousers striped red and white, embroidered collars on their shirts, straw hats with a colored band — worn as unremarkable daily clothing by farmers walking to their cornfields, not as festival costume.

The highest inhabited town in Central America, more or less

Todos Santos itself sits at around 2,500 meters, but the real superlative belongs to Chemal, a hamlet not far above town frequently cited as the highest inhabited settlement in Central America. I hiked up toward it on a clear, brutally cold morning, passing stone houses with smoke curling from cooking fires and fields of corn planted at an altitude that seemed to defy the crop’s usual logic. The air had that thin, scraped-clean quality you only get above 3,000 meters, and looking back down at Todos Santos in its valley, the whole Cuchumatanes range unfolded in ridge after grey-green ridge toward the Mexican border.

The race that shouldn’t work and somehow does

I’d planned my entire trip around being there for the Skach Koyl on November 1st — the All Saints’ Day horse race — and no amount of description I’d read prepared me for the reality. Riders in full traditional traje, having been drinking since dawn as tradition more or less demands, gallop a short dirt track back and forth for hours, falling off regularly, getting back on, cheered by a crowd that treats the inevitable spills as part of the entertainment rather than a tragedy in progress. A local I’d befriended the night before explained that finishing the day still on your horse, drunk or not, is itself a form of honor, tied to old beliefs about keeping evil spirits at bay for the year ahead. Nobody I asked could fully explain the tradition’s origins, and I got the sense that not fully explaining it is part of the point.

When to go: Late October through November 1st specifically for the horse race and its accompanying fiesta; otherwise visit December through March for clear mountain views, and bring far warmer clothing than you think you’ll need.