What Cenote Nohoch is, and why you have not heard of it
Cenote Nohoch is a cave cenote inland from the coast between Tulum and Akumal. It is roofed and dark, swum with a guide, with formations along the passage and bats above the water — and it is the second most visited cenote among the tours on this site, after Gran Cenote.
It is also almost invisible outside the tour trade. It has no public opening hours, no published gate price and no address you can plug into a map. Where Gran Cenote is a destination that tours happen to visit, Nohoch is a destination that exists through tours. That is not unusual on this coast: a great many cenotes sit on ejido or family land and reach visitors through an arrangement with an operator rather than through a ticket window.
The reason to book one of these tours
Time in the water. The tours here allocate two hours at Nohoch, and one allocates three — the longest single cenote block anywhere in this catalogue. A multi-cenote morning on the same coast gives you forty minutes at each stop.
Two hours changes what a cave cenote is. Forty minutes is a swim through and out. Two hours is enough to go slowly, to stop under the formations, to get cold and warm up and go back in, and to be there after the group ahead has left. If the enclosed cenotes are what you came for, this is where the arithmetic favours you.
Know that it is a cave before you go
This matters more here than at the semi-open cenotes. Nohoch is enclosed and dark, and several travellers arrive expecting the bright turquoise pool from the booking photographs and are taken aback. It is a genuinely striking swim, and it is not a sunbathing spot.
On one of these tours the cave swim is explicitly optional and guests may stay in the open section instead. On the others it is the cenote. If anyone in your group is uneasy in enclosed water, check which you are booking, or look at Canamayte, where an open cenote and a cavern sit five minutes apart.
What these tours have in common
All four pair Nohoch with the Tulum archaeological site, and three add a second headline stop — snorkelling with sea turtles at Akumal Bay, or the ruins at Cobá. That makes them long days rather than cenote mornings, typically eight to twelve hours depending on where you are collected from.
The turtles are in the Caribbean at Akumal Bay. They are not in the cenote, and no cenote anywhere holds sea turtles, whatever a tour is called. The two swims are entirely different and happen at different stops on the same day.
Watch the fees, and read your own listing
Cenote admission is included on all four of these tours. What is collected on the day varies sharply, and one case is worth flagging: the Cobá day collects US$65.90 per person for archaeological site admission, by credit card only, which turns an advertised US$44.40 into US$110.30 per person. Cash will not settle it. Others collect a reserve tax of US$10 to US$15 per person in cash.
Two of these tours are the same three stops from the same operator, sold from two departure points — and they contradict each other on whether Akumal Bay admission is included. There is no way to resolve that; each card states its own listing. Confirm on the booking page before you pay, and see costs, fees and timing for the full picture.
A note on the name
One of these tours carries a web address referring to Dos Ojos, and its published itinerary names Cenote Nohoch instead — the address is a leftover from an older product. A traveller on the same tour refers to the cenote by a different name again. Its itinerary decides where it belongs, which is here rather than with Dos Ojos.
