Coming from Guatemala City or Antigua, Lake Atitlan is at the beginning of the superb landscapes and cultures of Guatemala's Western Highlands.
The small towns and villages squeezed into around the shores of Lake Atitlan reflect the traditions, crafts and way of life of the Tz’utujil and Kaqchikel Maya. Panajachel is the largest, having grown with the roads that connect it to the wider world. It has one of the region’s earliest churches with a façade of 16th-century stonework much repaired after repeated earthquakes. Small museums show archaeological fragments found in the basin, including obsidian blades, ceramic vessels and spindle whorls evidencing the region’s long habitation and trade with the Pacific coast and the central highlands. Several family workshops produce backstrap-woven cloth, carved wooden masks and images used in the town's religious processions.
West of Panajachel, San Pedro La Laguna is tucked into a corner of land that rises steeply from the lake. Its residents are predominantly Tz’utujil, with language, dress patterns and rituals that differ from the Kaqchikel-speaking villages. It has a notable tradition of textile production. Family workshops weave cotton cloth on backstrap looms to patterns based on wide bands of geometric motifs in strong colours to designs that are often identified with San Pedro itself. The village has a long association with coffee cultivation on the flanks of the volcano. Small plots of coffee bushes occupy mid-altitude zones, shaded by taller trees and harvested by hand during the season. Try some.
Next around the western shoreline, San Juan La Laguna is also known weaving, mainly through cooperatives developed from family workshops during the late 20th century. They maintain distinctive local techniques with cotton dyed with indigo, tree bark and cochineal. You can see the dyeing process with samples of raw and treated fibres laid out in trays. Changes in weaving patterns are on show with older motifs beside contemporary designs. San Juan also has a folk-tradition of Tz’utujil na�ve landscape painting with scenes of agricultural work, lakeside activity and religious events in precise lines and crowded compositions. You can see these at galleries in the village.
The intriguing town of Santiago Atitlán, a ferry-ride across the water from Panachel, stands below two of the largest volcanoes. It has been a significant Tz’utujil centre since pre-colonial times. The church of Santiago Apóstol, built on 16th-century foundations, holds an important collection of wooden saints carved over several centuries and organises processions with banners, floral arrangements and images across the religious calendar.
Santiago is also the centre of the tradition of Maximón, a complex Mayan deity and folk saint also connected with Catholic beliefs, deeply rooted in this part of the highlands. His carved wooden effigy, dressed in layers of richly patterned shawls and often smoking a cigarette and wearing a modern hat and sunglasses, is housed each year at the home of a member of the Santiago's cofradía. The hosting room contains candles, ceremonial masks and offerings of alcohol and tobacco. His attendants tend the candles and place offerings made by visitors, who you may join. Maximon is carried in a formal procession each Holy Week accompanied by musicians and members of the brotherhood. He is a healer, a trickster, a defence against witches, a protector of the Maya, and a judge.
Santiago's workshops produce carved masks, wooden saints and textiles. Fishing boats moor by the ferry dock while families maintain small plots of coffee and maize on the slopes of the volcanos above the town.
San Lucas Tolimán, crammed into a small area beside the lake below Tolimán volcano (3158m), has focussed on coffee for more than a hundred years. Further along the shore Santa Catarina Palopó is noted for the painted designs on many of its buildings, created as part of a community-led project in the early 21st century with motifs from local textiles, including geometric shapes and stylised birds. San Antonio Palopó has a long-established tradition of studio pottery with a hand painted designs and a distinctive blue glaze.
There are some lovely walks following traditional paths above the lake shore. From Panachel there is a good path to the little lakeshore village of Santa Cruz La Laguna - also accessed by boat. There are many more: through woodlands, passing terraced plots, crossing streams and taking stone steps for steeper sections. Chapels, clusters of houses and small community buildings appear at intervals. You can go higher to fields of tree-shaded coffee and magnificant wide views of the basin, with the volcanoes of the southern shore rising above the lake.
Beyond Atitlan, the highland town of Sololá, a Kaqchikel Maya community, is a regional centre with one of the country’s longest-running markets, with fruit and vegetables, useful handtools, ceremonial items and a great variety of textiles brought in from weaving villages around the area.
In the highlands around Atitlan terraced agriculture has long been used to manage the steep terrain. Archaeological surveys have documented ancient terrace walls beneath modern fields. Coffee, maize and beans occupy different altitude zones, while down at the lake canoes and small wooden boats fish its shallower waters. Birdlife around the lake includes herons, egrets and grebes. Quetzals are seen in patches of cloud forest above the basin drawn to native trees such as aguacatillo, their firm favourite.
Beneath the southern waters of Lake Atitlan lies Samabaj, a submerged Preclassic site discovered by divers in the 1990s and now considered one of the most significant underwater archaeological sites in the Americas. Archaeologists have found stone platforms, altars and stairways at varying depths, suggesting a small ceremonial centre that was inundated when the lake level rose in ancient times. Artefacts recovered prior to the site’s protected status include incense burners, ceramic vessels and stone tools.
Lake Atitlan is an altogether wonderful place. You may find yourself agreeing with Aldous Huxley who came here in 1934 and compared it, in his dry style, to Lake Como in Italy "with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes" and declared it to be "the most beautiful lake in the world".