The Cahabón river disappears under a natural limestone bridge three hundred metres long, and on top of it sits a staircase of pools the colour of bottle glass — fed by springs and small enough to wade between. The river itself roars underneath, out of sight, and comes back out at the far end in a mess of white water. It is the single most photographed place in Guatemala that is not a Maya ruin, and unlike the ruins it is genuinely hard to reach.
The pools are warm, shallow and swimmable, and most people spend a day doing exactly that. The mirador — a steep half-hour climb up through forest from the entrance — is what puts the place in context: from above you see the whole terraced chain and the river vanishing beneath it, which you cannot make sense of from the water.
Getting here is the price of admission. The road from Lanquín is eleven kilometres of dirt that takes an hour in the back of a pickup, and the route in from Cobán or Flores is long on any day and worse in the wet. Nearly everyone stays in Lanquín and comes for the day.
Most day trips bundle the pools with the Kan'ba caves alongside — candle-lit wading and swimming through a river cave, with a rope climb up a waterfall in the dark. It is more adventurous than it sounds and not for the unsteady.