An island off the Caribbean coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that was one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in the Maya world, especially in the Postclassic period (roughly 1200–1500 CE). Maya travelers, by Spanish accounts often women hoping for safe childbirth, crossed the sea to consult an oracle of the goddess often identified with Ix Chel, associated with the moon, healing, childbirth, weaving, and divination. Cortes stopped here in 1519 at the start of the conquest of Mexico; disease and conquest later emptied the island. Today it is one of the world's busiest cruise-ship ports and a famous scuba-diving destination on the Mesoamerican Reef.
Maya women once climbed into canoes and paddled across open sea to reach a small island, hoping a goddess would grant them a safe birth. The island was Cozumel, and the goddess was later identified with Ix Chel, linked to healing, childbirth, weaving, and the moon. Five centuries later, the same shoreline receives crowds of a different kind: millions of cruise passengers a year step off enormous ships onto one of the busiest ports of its type on earth. The shrine and the dock occupy the same few miles of coral coast.