Maya Love Goddess Lures Couples To Isla Mujeres
June 12, 2012 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Bounced around a Caribbean by a charge in 1517, 3 Spanish ships wound adult during a little Maya island of Ekab during a tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The foreigners inked it on their maps as Isla Mujeres (Island of a Women) after a womanlike figurines detected by a sailors in an ancient tabernacle on a island.
The Spanish conquistadores, who’d set out to constraint rough slaves to work a mines and sugarine plantations of Cuba, found few good possibilities among a handful of Maya fishermen vital on a skinny, four-mile-long island. So after planting a outrageous cranky on a beach and reading El Requerimiento, a commercial (in Spanish) revelation a uncomprehending villagers they’d turn subjects of a Spanish king, a invaders sailed on to what they hoped would be richer shores.
Isla Mujeres is about 8 miles northeast of Cancun.
The foreigners didn’t know it, though their latest defeat was one of a dedicated islands of Ixchel (eee-shel), a Maya love, fertility, rain, medicine and moon enchantress and a super-deity in a Maya pantheon.
Fast-forward to today, and — after centuries of especially being home to a few fishing families and occasional pirates — Isla Mujeres now hosts divers, whale-shark watchers, off-the-beaten-track vacationers, campers, locally stationed sailors and a quick flourishing expat art colony. Also seen darting around in rented golf carts are hordes of day-visitors from a mega-resort during Cancun about a 20-minute vessel float away.
Restaurant menus underline creatively held seafood.
The island’s powdery, white-sand beaches are dotted by 73 inns and hotels with a sum of around 1,400 rooms. Sometimes it’s tough to find an dull room, though some-more mostly than not there are copiousness of vacancies. But that might change soon.
Local officials devise to money in on Ixchel’s participation on Isla Mujeres by branding a island as a smashing mark to get married, suffer a honeymoon, applaud anniversaries and differently bask in a regretful aura of their hometown enchantress — most like a Greek enchantress of adore Aphrodite is used to move such business to her home island of Cyprus.
Isla Mujeres Tourism Director Eyder Jahil Hoth pronounced Ixchel’s temples and statues are “natural attractions” for visiting couples. A quite renouned place for weddings, he noted, is on a clifftop nearby a hull of Templo Ixchel, believed to have been a goddess’ categorical tabernacle on a island.
The weddings and intrigue thesis is echoed in selling programs by a series of internal hotels. The 117-room Ixchel Beach Hotel, for instance, offers a choice of non-denominational, devout or polite ceremonies on a beach lonesome with rose petals and illuminated by tiki torches. White doves or butterflies are expelled during a finish of a ceremony. Optional extras embody glow dancers and a mariachi band.
Another hotel, a Privilege Aluxes, lures couples to a 124 bedrooms with this pitch: “Just imagine… bluish Caribbean waters…a white sandy beach…an oceanfront marriage gazebo…champagne … flowers…”
View from a Dream Luxury Villa.
Among promotions during a high finish is a Ixchel Dream Wedding Package during a Dream Luxury Villa. For a prosaic $14,900, a integrate and adult to 4 guest can have disdainful use of a four-suite villa unaware a Caribbean for 3 nights. The add-on includes rides from Cancun to a island and behind on a private yacht, all dishes — prepared by a group’s possess cook — and with cooking by candlelight. The couple’s bed is strewn with rose petals in a room illuminated by aromatherapy candles. Also enclosed is a marriage rite and a champagne accepting during a villa for adult to 35 guest staying during any of a Dreams’ 4 sister Real resorts in Cancun and a Riviera Maya.
For a record: According to Isla Mujeres cronista (historian) Fidel Villanueva, a internal tabernacle of Ixchel is one of 32 such shrines on islands off a seashore of a Yucatan Peninsula and also on a mainland. The goddess’ principal tabernacle is on a island of Cozumel.
Photo credits: Overhead perspective of a island pleasantness of Isla Mujeres Tourism Office. Other images by Bob Schulman.
