The Island Pilgrimage, as a Spanish Friar Recorded It

The best surviving description of the goddess's cult on Cozumel comes from Diego de Landa, the Franciscan bishop whose mid-sixteenth-century account of Yucatec Maya customs, written decades after the conquest and despite his own notorious role in burning Maya books, remains one of the fullest colonial sources for pre-conquest religious practice. Landa describes Cozumel, whose Maya name is recorded as an island associated with swallows, as a major pilgrimage destination that drew visitors from across the Yucatan peninsula, with women in particular said to make the crossing from the mainland, traditionally by canoe across the channel separating the island from the coast, at least once during their lives, to seek the goddess's favor in matters of fertility and childbirth.

The principal architectural remains associated with this cult today are found at the site now called San Gervasio, a complex of Maya structures on Cozumel that archaeologists have identified as a major ceremonial center of the pilgrimage tradition Landa described, though matching specific standing structures to specific recorded rituals remains an ongoing scholarly project rather than a settled matter. Landa's account, like all colonial ethnographic writing produced by churchmen with their own agendas and limited fluency in Maya religious concepts, needs to be read critically rather than taken as a transparent window onto pre-conquest belief; but the basic outline it preserves, a significant, women-centered pilgrimage cult of fertility and healing centered on Cozumel, is corroborated by the island's evident importance as a ceremonial center in the archaeological record independent of Landa's writing.