Palms trees line the road as we leave Palenque at 8.30am on a bright blue and scorching day. The very helpful Daniel has dropped us off at the bus station and we tell him that we really enjoyed our trip to Agua Azul and were pleased to learn that the road is safe and armed attacks are no longer happening. He looks surprised and says that hold-ups of tourists do still happen and although the section to the waterfalls is safe, we were absolutely right to take the big bus on the long way round from San Cristóbal. 

Thankfully the road from Palenque to our next destination is totally safe, although it’s another long drive. We pass through long expanses of flat farmland, much of it devoted to cattle farming, with huge lush green fields, glittering streams and little haciendas, wading birds and banana trees, broad rivers and small villages. We make brief stops at the larger towns of Emiliano Zapata and Escárcega, before crossing into Campeche state and continue along Highway 180 with the Spanish language version of James Bond’s ‘No Time To Die’ keeping the bus entertained. 

Four and a half hours after we leave Palenque we arrive at the Gulf of Mexico and the seafront town of Champoton, from where we follow the coast road north for another hour. Dubbed the Ruta de Las Piratas, the name references the 17th and 18th century when this part of the Caribbean was plagued by pirates. And the beautiful and historic city of Campeche, discovered as a small Mayan village in 1517 but founded as a Spanish settlement in 1540, was the scene of many of their most brutal attacks. 

After being dropped at our home there for the next few nights, Hotel Castelmar, we walk along the Malecón, the seafront promenade, where we are treated to the most incredible sunset, and one which rivals the best we’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. The next morning we learn from our guide Enrique, that the Maya used to refer to these sunsets as the Great Parrot of Fire in the Sky, due to the vivid colours which mimic the feathers of local birds and transform the horizon as the sun sinks into the sea.  

Enrique is another brilliant story teller and great company, reflecting the pride in their country and detailed training all Mexican guides go through, with two new courses required to be completed in specialist subjects every year to maintain their guiding licenses. Our morning tour starts with him recounting the piratical history of Campeche which is the result of its specific location and the European politics of the time. 

Spanish ships carrying the vast riches of the New World and Philippines left for Europe from the port of Veracruz and had to sail past the Bay of Campeche to reach Cuba, their final stop before crossing the Atlantic to the Canaries and then onto Spain. Campeche had specialist craftsmen who would prepare the ships to reach Cuba but as the bay is incredibly shallow, stretching out to sea for over two kilometres at less than six feet deep, while the galleons anchored  in the bay they were too far from shore to be defended by Spanish cannons, meaning they were sitting ducks for pirates. 

The pirates were essentially freelance mercenaries for the French, British and Dutch who were determined to thwart Spain’s new found wealth and power. They were encouraged to attack and destroy all things Spanish, paying twenty percent of their loot in tax to their respective governments and allowed to keep the rest. The more brutal and bloody their attacks, the better were their spoils, so they would also land onshore and invade the town, meaning Campeche suffered eighteen devastating invasions, despite constructing huge city wall defences.  

Enrique recounts the history while we are sat in the pretty main square, Parque de La Independencia, with its twin-towered cathedral and reconstructed Customs House, housing museums including one dedicated to Mayan archaeology featuring an impressive jade death mask from the major site of Calakmul in the south of the state. He points out a blue house on the corner where Gustavo Cierra Mendez was born, now known as the Teacher of Mexico, having founded its first university. 

Gustavo’s father was Gusto Cierro O’Reilly who popularised the romantic idea of pirates in his early 19th Century novel ‘The Buccaneer’, which fictionalised the 1633 attack of Campeche by Diego de Los Reyes, also known as Diego the Mulatto, who invaded the city with a Dutch pirate called Cornelius Holt, famous for having a wooden leg. They were portrayed as heroes for political expediency as the novel was written during the quest for Mexican independence so these enemies of a Spain were cast as noble freedoms fighters bringing the idea of swashbuckling Buccaneers into popular imagination, but the reality was far more brutal.

Buccaneers were actually slaves forced to man supply ships carrying fresh water and food halfway across the Atlantic to refuel Spanish ships before returning to Cuba and Campeche and often pirates would seize the ships, pull alongside the waiting galleons, slaughter the Spanish sailors and steal their goods. Essentially pirates were ruthless, bloodthirsty criminals, hugely violent and feared. Young men often joined the pirates for a life of adventure and excitement in the same way drug cartels recruit new members now.  

British pirates who terrorised and slaughtered the local population of Campeche included William Parker, Henry Moore and Francis Drake but the worst attack came from a Dutch pirate in 1865 called Laurence de Graf, who was known as Laurencillo. He assembled a multinational force of fifteen ships and 1200 pirates and laid siege to Campeche, which was then a town of 8000 inhabitants, for 56 days. An Irishman named Macgreor who was living in Campeche tried to open dialogue with Laurencillo but as he was suing for peace, a Spanish battalion from Merida arrived to counter attack. Laurencillo suspecting a double cross beheaded the town’s inhabitants and burnt the city to the ground. 

The beautiful city we see today is the result of the reconstruction started in 1686 and built in the architectural style of Havana, being far closer to Cuba than Mexico City. And in fact, many American films set in Havana are actually shot in Campeche, with Che Guavera even honeymooning here in the 1940s and having clandestine meetings with Fidel Castro in coffeeshops around the square. 

Finally in the last years of the 18th century, after the Bourbon reforms which ended state sponsored terrorism on the high seas, Campeche became safe and for a few decades became a boom town, one of the richest in the world, due to the sisal trade, building the brand new Cathedral in 1775. Local haciendas cultivated the henequen plant whose fibres became used by 90% of the global shipping trade to make ropes and the hacienda owners grew vastly wealthy as a result. 

Enrique takes us into Casa No 6 on the square, now a museum that illustrates how the high society of the late 19th Century lived, and explains how the designation of UNESCO World Heritage has restored Canpeche’s historic central area to its past glories, ensuring the facades of buildings can only be painted in specific traditional colours. Major restoration is underway again having been put on hold during Covid so many buildings are covered in scaffolding and being re-plastered and painted. 

He leads us along the city walls explaining how the bastions were cleverly designed to repel invaders and then drives us along the Malecón and up to the Fort of San Miguel, one of the farthest defensive areas of the city. We finish our trip at the Church of San Roman, which houses an an enormous Cristo Negro statue carved from ebony and brought from Africa on a silver crucifix. Just beyond the church is a monument commemorating three key dates - the independence of Mexico in 1817, the separation of the states of Yucatán and Campeche in 1857 and the 1917 Mexico Revolution and creation of the new Constitution.

It’s been a long morning so after lunch at Fresh n Green on Campeche’s main pedestrianised street we spend a couple of hours just wandering around the pretty colonial streets which are blazing with colour in the rich sunshine. And that evening the Great Parrot of Fire in the Sky reappears with an even more dramatic display of its celestial plumage. 

But it’s the margarita we have at Marganzo restaurant that night, which specialises in Yucatán cuisine, that really provokes hallucinogenic images, as both Coman and I have the most insanely vivid and strange dreams during the night - perhaps they left the worm in the mezcal that they used. 

Campeche is definitely proving a revelation.