Set your expectations correctly and Cozumel's Maya sites are one of the most interesting things on the island. Set them wrong and you will be disappointed within ten minutes. There is no great pyramid here. There never was. What Cozumel had instead was a role: it was a sanctuary island, and the buildings that survive are the modest architecture of a place people travelled to rather than a place people ruled from.
The island's Maya name, Cuzamil, is usually translated as the land of the swallows. Its significance was religious. Colonial accounts describe Cozumel as the site of a shrine to Ixchel — goddess of the moon, of childbirth and fertility, of weaving and of medicine — and record that Maya women from across the Yucatán were expected to make the crossing at least once in their lives to leave an offering. That is the fact that gives the stones their weight. You are standing in a place that people reached by paddling a canoe across nineteen kilometres of open channel, which is roughly the same water the cruise ships now cover in half an hour.
San Gervasio, in the middle of the island off the cross-island Transversal road, is the principal surviving site and the only one with any real scale. Its groups of low, thick-walled buildings were linked by sacbeob, the raised white limestone causeways the Maya built between ceremonial precincts, and one of those causeways still ends in an arch you walk through. The site was occupied for well over a thousand years and remained active into the sixteenth century, when Grijalva reached the island in 1518 and Cortés the following year. Within a generation, introduced smallpox had emptied the place. Cozumel was largely abandoned for two centuries, and the modern island begins in 1847, when families fleeing the Caste War settled at El Cedral.
Beyond San Gervasio the sites are small and scattered. El Cedral, a village three kilometres inland from the southern coastal road, has the island's oldest known standing structure — a single vaulted room, once painted, now sharing a green with a nineteenth-century church. El Caracol, inside the Punta Sur park at the southern tip, is a low conch-shaped building that locals have long said whistles when a strong wind comes in from the south, an idea that has attracted a good deal of speculation about hurricane warning and no shortage of embellishment. Castillo Real sits on the undeveloped northeast coast at the end of an unpaved track and is realistically off-limits to visitors in a rental vehicle.
Do one thing first if you have the time: the island museum on the San Miguel waterfront. An hour there makes San Gervasio legible in a way no signboard at the site will.
