Baúl

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On Saturday, I walked up Quetzaltenango's little mountain, Baúl, with Cindy from the language school. While it's unwise to climb Baúl alone, particularly in the afternoons, in the mornings it's a very popular walk for city dwellers. The path up passes under fragrant eucalyptus and pine trees, tranquil except for the subdued noise of traffic from the city below. From the wooded top, you can see almost all of Xela filling a large valley, which looks even more relaxed from above than it does from the streets, with low buildings and neighbourhoods broken up by parks and fields. Cindy pointed out a few landmarks like the Parque Centro America, the cemetary and the football stadium.

Baúl gets its name from an old story connected with the place. It is said that the people who use to live in the area were very rich, and in order to protect their gold they enclosed it in boxes called baúles and buried them all around the mountain. To this day the hill is full of gold, as whenever a treasure hunter comes close to locating a baúl, its guardian goblins move it to another location, making it impossible to find.

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