Discover Semuc Champey

The Cahabón River carries dissolved calcium carbonate from Alta Verapaz’s karst highlands. Where it encounters a particular section of the landscape it has, over millennia, carved a tunnel through the bedrock—a process known as karst piracy, in which a river diverts underground rather than continuing at the surface. At Semuc Champey, virtually all of the Cahabón’s flow enters a cave at the upstream end of a 300-meter limestone slab, thunders through an underground passage, and re-emerges downstream. The slab above is left dry enough that a small fraction of the river seeps across its surface.

That surface flow deposits calcite on the slab as it loses carbon dioxide to the open air, gradually building up the low travertine dams that create the stepped pool system. Today the pools are approximately one meter deep in most places. The turquoise color reflects the high limestone content—the same mechanism that produces the colors at Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes or Turkey’s Pamukkale, not a product of exceptional purity but of specific chemistry. The monument was designated Monumento Natural Semuc Champey in 2005 under Decreto 025 and is administered by CONAP, Guatemala’s national protected areas council.