APOCALYPTO

Las Tuxtlas is a special area containing the most northerly section of high rainforests in North America. Its enormous diversity makes the area unique in the world.
The Sierra de los Tuxtlas is a range of volcanic peaks that run right down to the Bay of Campeche on the coast of Veracruz .
Tlaloc, the rain god, was said to rule Los Tuxtlas in pre- Hispanic times as a happy realm for the souls of the departed. He still continues to rule, bestowing refreshing rain showers on the volcanic mountain range nearly 300 days per year.
Over 3,000 different plant species and up to 568 bird species by some counts can be found in the region which extends from sea level to 1,700 meters in height.
Los Tuxtlas mountains are volcanoes (San Martin last blew in 1793) which create a refreshing microclimate that forms the edge of the 90% destroyed rainforest.
Lake Catemaco is formed from the calderas of several extinct volcanoes
This wide range of geological features, from beach to crater to steep-walled canyons, coupled with the moist, tropical climate leads to a wide range of different habitats within a small area.
This beautiful area offers to the tourist some of the most impressing sceneries of Mexico: lakes (Lake Catemaco), waterfalls ("Salto de Eyipantla" and "Cola de Caballo"), colonial villages (Santiago Tuxtla and San Andrés Tuxtla), and ecological Preserves ("los Monos" and "las Garzas" Islands).

• THE TRAILER

For six hundred years the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula recorded dynastic events on stone columns. But during the ninth century, according to university researches Linda Schele and David Freidel, the practice died out in one Mayan city after another, signalling a cultural beginning of the end.
This spreading cultural silence was a symptom of a wider and still unexplained collapse. Evidence for archaeological digs indicates that the Maya suffered a catastrophic lost of population at the end of the classic period. Between AD 830 and 990, the Maya were reduced to about one third of their former numbers. Scientists have speculated that they were decimated by earthquake or hurricane, epidemic, civil war or invasion. But the true reason for the collapse vanished with the race.
One scenario recently advanced by archaeologists suggests the Maya may have been the victims not of cataclysm but of their own societal changes. Toward the close of the Classic period, according to this hypothesis, new farming techniques and an improved trade net-work made food more plentiful than ever before, and the population exploded, nearly doubling in only a hundred years.
Abundance, however, is only an illusion in the jungle, whose impoverished soil cannot sustain crops for more than a few years. Much of the land put under cultivation at this time was originally swamp or rain forest, marginal farmlands that soon lost their ability to feed the growing Mayan population. As food supplies ran short and malnutrition set in, more hands were needed in the fields. But fewer and fewer farm labourers were available because more workers were constantly in demand to build pyramids and temples. As food resources dwindle, competition between Mayan communities increased. An upsurge in warfare further weakened the strained society; when invaders overran some Mayan cities, the people no longer had the power to resist. Like the vine-shrouded ruins they left in the Central American jungle, the Maya slid into decline, less the victims of apocalypse, perhaps, than of their own success.