Todos Santos Cuchumatán

Introducing Todos Santos Cuchumatán

Way up in the Highlands, Todos Santos is as raw as Guatemalan village life gets – dramatic mountain scenery, mud streets, beans and tortillas and everything shut by 9pm. There are a couple of language schools operating here and this is the end point for the spectacular hike from Nebaj.

Todos Santos lies in the bottom of a deep valley, and the last 1¼ hours of the approach by bus are down a bone-shaking dirt road that leaves the paved Huehuetenango–Soloma road after a 1½-hour climb up from Huehue.

Traditional clothing is very much in use here and, unusually, it’s the male costume that is the more eye-catching. Men wear red-and-white-striped trousers, small flat hats with blue ribbon around them, jackets with multicolored stripes and thick woven collars. Saturday is the main market day, and by the end of it the main street is half-full of inebriated todosanteños staggering they know not where. There’s a smaller market on Wednesday.

Reasons to visit Todos Santos include good walking in the hills, learning Spanish (there are two schools) and getting to know a trad-itional and close-knit but friendly community. Todos Santos suffered terribly during Guatemala’s civil war and is still very poor. To supplement their subsistence from agriculture, families from here still travel in the early part of the year to work for meager wages in very tough conditions on coffee, sugar and cotton plantations on the Pacific Slope. Working in the US is, however, proving a more lucrative alternative for some todosanteños today, as the amount of new construction in the valley demonstrates.

Todos Santos gained notoriety in 2000 when a Japanese tourist and his Guatemalan bus driver were murdered by a mob of villagers after the tourist attempted to take photos of a young village girl. By all accounts this was an isolated incident sparked by rumors that child-sacrificing Satanists were in the area at the time. But it’s confirmation, if such were needed, that one should never photograph Maya people without permission

If you’re coming to Todos Santos in the wet season (mid-May to November), bring warm clothes, as it’s cold up here, especially at night.

Last updated: Jul 22, 2009