Swim in a cenote [snorkelling & scuba diving]

This large, lily-covered pool filled with wispy water weed, terrapins, fish, and the occasional small crocodile, has water as clear as air. It’s easy to visit from Tulum, yet it’s far less busy than nearby Gran Cenote.

This big, open swimming hole – set in low jungle and filled with fish is safe enough for small kids, has changing rooms, life jackets and water-entry platforms. It’s easy to reach, sitting right off the main Cancún-Chetumal highway 15 minutes’ drive from Playa.

A family-friendly cenote adventure park – with cliff-jumps, rope-swings, jungle trails and onsite changing rooms and lockers. Cristalino sits right outside Playa del Carmen, making it easy to reach, and immensely popular.

These twin cenotes are spectacular: marking the entrance to one of the longest underground rivers in the world – filled with water as clear as ocean air, passing through submerged caverns covered with spectacular cave formations and teeming with strange cave fish, crustaceans and bats. The cenotes are a premium cave-diving location and were used as locations for The Cave movie and the BBC’s Planet Earth documentary.

You don’t need to be a cave diver to visit. Some of the most beautiful caverns are accessible to snorkellers. PADI open water divers can go further and designated cave divers can explore the deeper caverns. Any diving requires advanced booking.

A big restaurant, a tequila museum and a tour bus car park: this big, open-air pool near Chichen Itza is hugely popular but empty at the beginning and end of the day.

With vertical walls dropping from thick jungle to a deep green pool, and cascades of dripping vines and roots, this atmospheric cenote is set in a 30m-high sinkhole, 60m wide and 40m deep, is an Instagram spectacular.

It’s also very close to Chichen Itza, making it a great stop before or after a visit there – but it does mean it gets crowded. Few of the hordes of swimmers realise that it was once used as a site of human sacrifice by Maya priests. Archaeologists have found grisly remains – alongside jewellery 50m down on the cenote floor.

The water is deep-green, clean and fresh, and inhabited by tiny black catfish. It’s not for divers, but swimming (for all ages) is a buzz, and it’s worth taking your snorkel too.

Not all cenotes are sink holes in the jungle. Manati (aka Casa Cenote) – tucked behind the long white sands of Tulum beach is the entrance to an underground river, which flows into a winding creek lined.

The cenote is named after the manatees which used to live here until tourism became overwhelming. There are plenty of fish though, including schools of large tarpon and a small Morelet’s crocodile called Panchito. And the water is glassy-clear – running from the creek into caverns fringed with a labyrinthine tangle of mangrove roots. Superb for snorkelling and novice divers.

One of a string of less-visited cenotes lying close to more celebrated Dos Ojos, Sac Actun sits in a dramatic cavern filled with stalactites and illuminated by a single hole in the roof. It’s on the Tulum-tour radar but arrive before 10am and you’ll have it to yourself.

With a platform jutting into the middle of a turquoise pool under a roof of stalactites, this cenote near Valladolid town is a busy Instagram favourite. Stay at the onsite cabanas and you can book a slot just for yourself.

Turquoise-blue, set in a low cavern covered with small stalactites and illuminated by soft light through roof holes, this cenote is a beauty. Its remote location at the end of a long dirt road between Tulum and Akumal keeps it fairly crowd-free.

This unique cenote, also known as Cenote Dzitnup, feels like a secret swimming hole. Set in a low-lit cavern dripping with stalactites, hidden 60ft underground, Xkeken looks like a film set from an Indiana Jones movie. There’s only one small, single opening in the ceiling to allow light in – around mid-morning, a single shaft of sunlight shines through, lighting the cavern in brilliant colours.

With small bats nesting on the ceiling, turquoise water and overhanging limestone formations, it’s an atmospheric place for a swim.

But much photographed and much visited, it can get very crowded. So come early or late and you’ll share it only with the black cave fish, who gently nibble your feet as you swim.

Covered in fragrant lilies, floating on a terrapin-filled pool of water as clear and fresh as mountain air and framed by a dramatic cave mouth, Gran Cenote is a beauty.

But while the cenote extends for miles underground, through spectacular caverns, the part snorkellers can visit is modest. To explore further you’ll need cave diving certification.