The Cayo District
We’ve compiled the best of the best in The Cayo District - browse our top choices for the top things to see or do during your stay.
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1. Belize Botanic Gardens
The life's work of ornithologist Ken duPlooy, the personable Judy duPlooy, and their family is the 45-acre Belize Botanic Gardens. It's an extensive collection of hundreds of trees, plants, and flowers from all over Central America. Enlightening tours of the gardens, set on a bank of the Macal River at Sweet Songs Jungle Lodge, are given by local guides who can tell you the names of the plants in Mayan, Spanish, and English as well as explain their varied medicinal uses. If your family is looking for a fun group activity, there are also tea tasting tours, a tamale-making class, and a palm workshop. An orchid house holds the duPlooys' collection of more than 100 orchid species, and there also is a palm exhibit. The Botanic Gardens also run gardening programs for Belize residents as well as great birding opportunities.
Chial Rd., San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize671--3322Sight Details
Rate Includes: BZ$15 guided tour -
2. Belize Medicinal Plants Trail
Also called the Rainforest Medicine Trail, this trail was originally developed by natural medicine guru Rosita Arvigo and gives you a quick introduction to traditional Mayan medicine. The trail takes you on a short, self-guided walk through the rain forest on the grounds of Chaa Creek, giving you a chance to study the symbiotic nature of its plant life. Learn about the healing properties of such indigenous plants as red gumbo-limbo and see some endangered medicinal plants. The shop here sells Mayan medicinal products like Belly Be Good and Flu Away.
Chial Rd., San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize880--2237-in BelizeSight Details
Rate Includes: BZ $10 self-guided tour, BZ$30 for a guided tour including Natural History Centre and Blue Morpho Breeding Center -
3. Cahal Pech
Just at the western edge of San Ignacio, on a tall hill, is a small, intriguing Mayan site, the unfortunately named Cahal Pech ("Place of the Ticks"). You probably won't be bothered by ticks now, however. It was occupied from around 1200 BC to around AD 900. At its peak, in AD 600, Cahal Pech was a medium-size settlement of perhaps 10,000 people with some three dozen structures huddled around seven plazas. It's thought that it functioned as a guard post, watching over the nearby confluence of the Mopan and Macal Rivers. It may be somewhat less compelling than the area's other ruins, but it's no less mysterious, and worth a visit, given that these structures mark the presence of a civilization we know so little about. Look for answers at the small visitor center and museum, where you can also find a guide.
Cahal Pech Hill, San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize822--2016-NICH Belize Institute of ArcheologySight Details
Rate Includes: BZ$10 -
4. Cayo Welcome Center
The largest tourism information center in the country, the BZ$4 million Cayo Welcome Center was established in San Ignacio due to the Cayo's archaeological sites and rain-forest jungle lodges getting an increasing number of visitors. Besides friendly staff who provide information about tours, lodging, restaurants, and sightseeing, the center has exhibits and photos of Mayan artifacts found in San Ignacio, along with contemporary art and cultural displays. Free Wi-Fi is available throughout. Food stalls and a burger restaurant are in or near the center complex, and there is easy access to the pedestrian-only section of Burns Avenue, with its tour guide offices, restaurants, bars, banks, shops, and budget hotels. The center also functions as a community center, with free movies and musical concerts by local bands some nights.
Savannah St., San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize800-624–0686-Belize Tourism Board in Belize City -
5. Chaa Creek Natural History Centre & Blue Morpho Butterfly Farm
The Natural History Centre at The Lodge at Chaa Creek has a small library and lots of displays on everything from butterflies to snakes (pickled in jars). Outside is a screened-in blue morpho butterfly-breeding center. If you haven't encountered blue morphos in the wild, you can see them up close here and even peer at their slumbering pupae, which resemble jade earrings. Once you're inside the double doors, the electric blue beauties, which look boringly brown when their wings are closed, flit about or remain perfectly still, sometimes on your shoulder or head, and open and close their wings to a rhythm akin to inhaling and exhaling. Tours are led by a team of knowledgeable naturalists. You can combine a visit here with one to the Belize Medicinal Plants Trail.
Chial Rd., San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize880--2237-in BelizeSight Details
Rate Includes: BZ$10 self-guided tour; BZ$30 combined with guided Belize Medicinal Plant Trail tour -
Recommended Fodor’s Video
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6. El Pilar
Near the border of Belize and Guatemala, El Pilar is still being excavated under the direction of Anabel Ford, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the MesoAmerican Research Center. El Pilar is three times larger than Xunantunich, but because it's at the end of a 7-mile (12-km) rough dirt road, you're likely to have the place to yourself; it gets only a few hundred visitors a year. Excavations of Mayan ruins have traditionally concentrated on public buildings, but at El Pilar the emphasis has been on reconstructing domestic architecture—everything from houses to gardens with crops used by the Maya. El Pilar, occupied from 800 BC to AD 1000, at its peak may have had a population of 20,000. Several well-marked trails take you around the site. Because the structures haven't been stripped of vegetation, you may feel as if you're walking through a series of shady orchards. Don't forget binoculars: in the 5,000-acre nature reserve there's terrific bird-watching. Behind the main plaza, a lookout grants a spectacular view across the jungle to El Pilar's sister city, Pilar Poniente, on the Guatemalan border. There is a visitor center, the Be Pukte Cultural Center of Amigos de El Pilar, in Bullet Tree Falls (usually open daily 9–5), where you can get information on the site and pay the admission fee. Note that several incidents of robbery have occurred at or near El Pilar. You may want to visit this site on a tour, available from several tour operators in San Ignacio including Crystal Paradise/Birding in Paradise.
Bullet Tree Falls, Cayo, Belize822--2106-NICH Institute of Archeology in BelmopanSight Details
Rate Includes: BZ$10 -
7. Spanish Lookout
The hilltop community of Spanish Lookout, population 3,000, about 5 miles (8 km) north of the George Price Highway, is one of the centers of Belize's 11,000-strong Mennonite community, of which nearly 3,000 are in Cayo District. The easiest access to Spanish Lookout is via the paved Route 30 at Mile 57.5 of the Price Highway. The village's blond-haired, fair-skinned residents may seem out of place in this tropical country, but they're responsible for much of the construction, manufacturing, and agriculture in Belize. They built many of Belize's resorts, and most of the chickens, eggs, cheese, and milk you'll consume during your stay come from their farms. Many of the small wooden houses that you see all over Belize are Mennonite prefabs built in Spanish Lookout. In Belize's conservative Mennonite communities, women dress in cotton frocks and head scarves, and the men don straw hats, suspenders, and dark trousers. Some still travel in horse-drawn buggies. However, most Mennonites around Spanish Lookout have embraced pickup trucks and modern farming equipment. The cafés and small shopping centers in Spanish Lookout offer a unique opportunity to mingle with these sometimes world-wary people, but they don't appreciate being gawked at or photographed any more than you do. Stores in Spanish Lookout are modern and well-stocked, the farms wouldn't look out of place in the U.S. Midwest, and many of the roads are paved (the Mennonites do their own road paving). Oil in commercial quantities was discovered in Spanish Lookout in 2005, and several wells are still pumping, although the amount of oil pumped has diminished in recent years.
Spanish Lookout, Cayo, Belize -
8. Tropical Wings
Besides thoughtful displays on the Cayo flora and fauna, Tropical Wings, a little nature center, raises about 20 species of butterfly including the blue morpho, owl, giant swallowtail, and monarch varieties. The facility, at The Trek Stop, also has a small restaurant and gift shop, along with cabins.
Mile 71.5, George Price Hwy., San José Succotz, Cayo, Belize660--7895Sight Details
Rate Includes: BZ$30
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