CHIAPAS: RIO LA VENTA
- Chiapas: Rio la Venta
Zoque: a people of southern Mexico who inhabited much of the Mexican isthmus in the pre-Colombian era. The Zoque indians, neighbours to and rivals of the Maya, enjoyed over two thousand years of major cultural development (1200 BC to l000 AD).
In the late pre-Hispanic period and colonial age, the area occupied by the Zoque was reduced to the western Chiapas by increasing pressure from the Aztecs, Zapotecs, Maya and Spanish.
Today there are around 30,000 Zoque.
Ipstek is a legendary sacred place of the Zoque culture. Knowledge of its existence was handed down orally for over a thousand years, to the beginning of the last century. It was where the water gods and Naguales (shamans' animal alter egos) lived. Ipstek thus served as a place of initiatory, curative and propitiatory (rain) rituals and of contact with other-world entities. In the Zoque tongue, Ipstek means “twenty houses”. The mountain chain crossing the Selva el Ocote is still known as the Sierra Veinte Casas in fact.
When La Venta flows into the area it's a very small river but it becomes enormously swollen by the waters of the plateau, whose sources are lost in the canyon. During our very first expeditions here we decided to explore this river, first by travelling its entire length (a journey of ten days or so) and then studying particular sections of it and exploring the rapids, the forgotten channels that thunder down from the dense highland vegetation. The water that flows magically and immutably, cool and full of life, is absolutely unexpected after the heat of the plateau, as are the white walls of its banks that appear so suddenly in the forest. The rio is fed by waters absorbed up high up and released into the light again after travelling through vast and wonderful cave systems. In one of them, infinitely more beautiful than any famous tourist “grotto”, we travelled in darkness for around 10 kilometres before exiting onto the plateau, 380 metres higher up.
