Kindred Spirits

A national park in Belize has deep roots in Mayan healing traditions.

- Gina DeCaprio Vercesi

SMOKE CURLED around my body as Maria Garcia, a Yucatec Maya healer, walked around me in circles, swinging a pail of incense. I closed my eyes and inhaled the spicy fragrance—copal resin mixed with cinnamon and rosemary—while Garcia brushed my limbs with a bundle of piper amalago leaves. The plant, part of the family that includes common black pepper, is sacred to the Maya for its healing properties. “We use it like a brush to remove all of the negativity,” Garcia said. “You give all that’s not good to the plant and the plant gives you its energy.”

I was standing in Garcia’s jungle-like garden in San Antonio, a small Mayan village in the western district of Cayo, in Belize. Bordering Guatemala, Cayo was in ancient times a center of Mayan civilization. Now it’s home to Noj Ka’ax H’Men Elijio Panti National Park (EPNP), one of four parks in the country comanaged by the Mayan community.

Established in 2001 thanks to the efforts of the Itzamna Society, a group formed by Indigenous Maya to protect their ancestral lands, the park is a cultural sanctuary for members of the community living in and around San Antonio. Its name, which means “canopied rainforest of healers,” also honors Garcia’s late uncle, Elijio Panti, who was a distinguished spiritual leader and healer.

With Garcia as its chairperson, the Itzamna Society helped run the park until 2009, when the group lost its agreement with the government, leaving the treasured landscape vulnerable to loggers and poachers. “The park went into abandonment,” Garcia said. More than a decade of negotiations ensued, and in 2022 the Itzamna Society regained its stake in the park. Since then the rainforest, which shelters hundreds of medicinal plants as well as tapirs, jaguarundis, peccaries, anteaters, and countless tropical bird species, has slowly begun to recover.