Travel in Belize: cruise tenders, the cayes and the Maya cities

How visitors have reached Belize since independence

Tourism is younger than the state. Before independence in 1981 Belize was not regarded as a destination, the Wikipedia tourism article says, because its infrastructure was inadequate. The industry expanded quickly in the 1990s, and Britannica records a fivefold rise in visitor numbers from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, partly because cruise ships began calling. The government made tourism its second development priority after agriculture, and the Belize Tourism Board works inside the Ministry of Tourism as the link between the state and private operators.

By 2012 arrivals of all kinds reached 917,869, about 584,683 of them from the United States, in the Wikipedia count, and the country came close to a million visitors in a calendar year for the first time. In 2007 the Belizean government put tourism at over 25% of all jobs and over 18% of GDP. What those visitors come for splits along the same line as the country's geography: the reef and the cayes to the east, the Maya cities and forests to the west and south.

Most overnight visitors fly in. The international airport lies about 14 kilometres from Belize City, and Britannica lists scheduled flights to the United States, Mexico and the rest of Central America; Wikipedia's economy article names gateways including Toronto, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami and San Salvador. Regular domestic flights link it with local airports across the country.

By land, the road network runs west to the Guatemalan border and north to the Mexican one, and all-weather roads join Belize City and Belmopan with the towns of the centre and north and with Punta Gorda on the southern coast. There is no working railway. Punta Gorda also handles sea traffic with Guatemala and Honduras across the Gulf of Honduras. Traffic drives on the right.

The IMF's 2025 mission named the constraints on overnight tourism plainly: hotel capacity, flight capacity and roads between districts. The Belize Tourism Board's figures show what the system carried.

The overnight count passed its 2019 level in 2024, by 8.8%; the cruise count was still 17.4% below 2019 in the 2025 projection.

Why cruise passengers come ashore by tender

Cruise passengers outnumbered overnight visitors in every year of the Board's table, and they are carried ashore. Belize City's harbour lacks modern facilities, and vessels over the permitted cargo size anchor more than a mile offshore; tenders carry passengers to and from the ships. Some passengers take tours into the nearby districts as well as seeing the city.

The city has been rebuilt more than once. A hurricane on 10 September 1931 destroyed over two-thirds of its buildings, and Hurricane Hattie and its tidal wave struck again on 31 October 1961, after which the government moved the capital inland; offices left for Belmopan in May 1970. Belize City sits on both banks of Haulover Creek at a delta mouth of the Belize River, on ground barely above sea level. It is the former capital, the main port and the centre of commerce, and Britannica counted 65,222 people there in 2024. St John's Anglican Cathedral dates from 1812 and Government House from 1814. The Baron Bliss Institute for the performing arts and the Belize City Museum, housed in a former colonial prison, are in the city, as is the Image Factory Art Foundation, which shows contemporary Belizean work. The capital, Belmopan, 80 kilometres inland, was built from 1966 and is home mostly to government employees and their families.

What the reef and the cayes are for

The Wikipedia article on the reef calls it the country's top tourist destination, visited for diving and snorkelling, and Britannica describes extensive protected waters, cays in abundance and an underwater cave system. The Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a World Heritage site since 1996, is made up of seven protected areas: Bacalar Chico National Park and Marine Reserve at the northern end, the Blue Hole and Half Moon Caye natural monuments, South Water Caye and Glover's Reef marine reserves, Laughing Bird Caye National Park and the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve near the southern border. Hol Chan Marine Reserve, off Ambergris Caye, protects another stretch of the reef. Entrance fees help fund the protected areas, alongside the national Protected Areas Conservation Trust, according to UNESCO.

Ambergris Caye, with the town of San Pedro, and Caye Caulker are the cayes most visitors reach first; the Wikipedia tourism article places them about 70 and 40 kilometres off the mainland coast and only a few miles from the barrier reef. Beyond the barrier lie the three atolls: Lighthouse Reef, with the Great Blue Hole that Jacques Cousteau made famous in 1970 and Half Moon Caye with its colony of red-footed boobies, and Glover's Reef and Turneffe. Other cayes listed as popular include Tobacco Caye, Goff's Caye, Laughing Bird Caye and St George's Caye, the site of the 1798 battle.

Fishing, boating, swimming and diving along the reef are the activities Britannica lists. The rules protecting the reef are recent: bottom trawling has been banned since December 2010 and offshore oil activity since 2017, and UNESCO took the reserve system off its danger list in June 2018.

Which Maya cities can be visited

The interior's other attraction is archaeological. Britannica names Caracol, Xunantunich, El Pilar and Cahal Pech as the most notable of the Maya sites popular with visitors. Caracol dominates the recorded history of the south and centre, and its stela 10 carries the last Classic Ch'olti'an date inside the country, 859. Xunantunich, in the Cayo District with the smaller Baking Pot, is dated by Britannica to about 650 to 890 AD.

In the north, Altun Ha, about 30 kilometres from Belize City, was a ceremonial and trading centre of the Classic period, and the carved jade head of the sun god Kinich Ahau was found in one of its tombs. Lamanai, on Hill Bank Lagoon in Orange Walk District, stayed in use after the classic centres of the south declined. In the south, Lubaantun and Nimli Punit stand in the Toledo District among the Mopan and Q'eqchi' villages, and Cuello near Orange Walk and Cerros on Chetumal Bay are older still, reaching back before the Classic period.

Where the forest reserves lie

About 59% of the forest lay inside protected areas in 2020. The Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, a cool upland of pine in Cayo, holds a group of waterfalls: Big Rock, Butterfly, Five Sisters and Thousand Foot Falls. The Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, founded in 1986 as a reserve for the jaguar, lies on the eastern slopes of the Maya Mountains below Victoria Peak and covers about 390 square kilometres in Britannica's figure, and Mayflower Bocawina National Park has Antelope Falls and Mayflower Bocawina Falls.

Across the country Britannica lists tapir, deer, jaguar, puma, known locally as red tiger, the American crocodile and the manatee among the larger animals; Baird's tapir, called the mountain cow, is protected as the national animal, and the keel-billed toucan is the national bird. The Wikipedia tourism article adds the Community Baboon Sanctuary and Swallow Caye Wildlife Sanctuary to its list of eco-tourism destinations, mentions hundreds of cave systems, and names cave rafting, kayaking, birdwatching and hiking among the activities on offer.

How the south receives visitors differently

South of Belmopan the country changes. Garifuna towns line the coast of the Stann Creek and Toledo districts and Mopan and Q'eqchi' Maya villages fill the interior of Toledo, and tourism there runs through villages as well as hotels. Cooperatives in southern Belize, developed with support from UNESCO, offer visits to cacao and cashew farms, lessons in Maya, Kriol and Garifuna craft, and overnight stays in villages with a community guide.

The coast from Dangriga south to Placencia has beaches at Hopkins, Maya Beach and Placencia, and Punta Gorda is the southern terminus, a port facing Guatemala and Honduras. Dangriga, which was already the largest Garifuna settlement in 1841, is where Garifuna Settlement Day on 19 November is officially dated, and its fishing tournament at Easter is broadcast on local radio.

When the seasons suit a visit

Belize has two seasons defined by rain. The dry season runs from late February to May and the wet season from June to November, with a short break in late July or August known as the little dry. The south is wetter throughout: about 4,445 millimetres a year at Punta Gorda against about 1,270 at Corozal in the north, on Britannica's figures, and its dry season is shorter. From September to December cooler northerly winds reach the coast.

Hurricanes are a risk from July through November, and the storms of 1931 and 1961 each devastated Belize City. September, inside that window, is also the month of the September Celebrations, when St George's Caye Day on the tenth and Independence Day on the 21st are marked across the country, together with Carnival. Ambergris Caye holds the San Pedro Costa Maya Festival each August. Easter weekend brings the Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic, and in March the four-day La Ruta Maya canoe race covers 290 kilometres from San Ignacio to Belize City.

What visitors eat

Food follows the communities described in the culture article. Breakfast, which Belizeans call drinking tea, is built on tortillas, johnny cakes or fry jacks, fried pieces of dough, served with refried beans, eggs and cheese, and street vendors sell tacos and meat pies in the morning. The midday meal is the main one, and some businesses close for it: rice and beans cooked with or without coconut milk, stewed chicken, tamales, panades and escabeche. Along the coast seviche is common, and Garifuna cooking in the south brings hudut, a fish stew in coconut milk served with mashed green plantain, and ereba, a cassava bread.

One dish arrives with a story attached. Gibnut, a tailless rodent hunted as game, is listed on many menus as royal rat, because the British press objected when it was served to Queen Elizabeth II in 1985. Local rum, distilled from sugarcane molasses, is often mixed with coconut water, and beer is brewed in the country.

What visitors find on arrival

English is the official language and the language of government and most media, and Kriol and Spanish are widely spoken alongside it. The Belize dollar is fixed at two to one against the United States dollar. Belize keeps Central Standard Time, six hours behind UTC, all year, with no summer time. The catalogue's own record lists British three-pin sockets alongside the two American types, at 220 volts.

In 2023 the World Health Organization certified Belize free of malaria. The practical pages of this catalogue give the clock and the calendar: Belize has its time and its public holidays, and the culture article covers the food visitors meet, from rice and beans to Garifuna hudut.