I was really bummed when Jailhouse got excavated.
There was something charming about the mudhole in the woods. And, obviously, something natural. Elemental.
I worried that the landowners were destroying the place when they opened it up. I worried about the water quality and the caves. I'm a conservation-minded hippie who wishes that the only old-growth forest left in the entire world wasn't a couple hundred square miles on the Belarus/Poland border... but rather vast swathes of the Earth.
But it is their land. Their property. To do with what they wish.
And what they wanted to do was create a pretty, little swimming hole that they could also mud-pump for silt to fertilise their fields (after all, the family is mostly interested in running the vast farm that surrounds the cenote).
They knocked the tiny, restrictive, zero-viz entry into something the size of a five-car garage. But, otherwise, there has been no affect to the cave whatsoever.
Meanwhile, there are other cenote owners who offer their properties as a place where garbage trucks can dump their loads directly over the water supply... where it is periodically lit on fire.
For my part: a bigger swimming hole and some silt for the corn is a better choice of land-managment.
Even more... they've just built stairs for us divers, too.
In the end, it's their ball, their rules. Just like every other douchebag developer all over Tulum who is paving over paradise to put up a parking lot.
If they wanted to throw donkey carcasses that they've killed with cyanide into that hole because they thought it was funny or it pleased their demonic god... that's their right. But they don't.
They built us stairs, instead.
And I'm grateful.
