ATM Cave (Actun Tunichil Muknal): Entrance Fee, Rules and Tour Prices

Verified on 26 August 2026, against NICH’s own visitor rules and ticket store, and two San Ignacio operators’ published tour pages.

You cannot enter ATM Cave without a certified guide, and you cannot take a camera in. The National Institute of Culture and History — the authority that administers the cave — publishes the entrance fee as BZ$60.00 for a Non-Resident (US$30 at Belize’s fixed 2:1 peg), states that “All visitors to ATM Cave must be accompanied by an ATM Certified Tour Guide”, and sets a maximum of 6 visitors per Tour Guide. The last tour of the day leaves at 2:00 pm and nobody is admitted to the cave after 3:00 pm. Both San Ignacio operators we priced charge US$145 per person for a group tour, with that entrance fee included.

The unusual thing about this site is that almost every operational rule comes from the authority rather than from the tour company — and the tour price, set by the operators, is the part that turns out to be uniform.

What NICH publishes

The fee is in Belize dollars. We confirmed the currency rather than reading it off the “$” symbol: NICH’s ticket store returns the currency code BZD through its store API. At the fixed 2:1 peg, BZ$60 is US$30.

The site closes at 5:00 pm, but the 2:00 pm last tour and the hard 3:00 pm entry cutoff are the times that actually govern a visit.

Physical requirements NICH sets

• Minimum 40 inch height requirement.
• Must be in good physical health.
• Must be able to swim.
• Must wear a life vest and a helmet with light.
• Long-sleeve shirts and footwear appropriate for rugged terrain.

Note that the 40-inch rule is a height rule, not an age rule. Pacz Tours restates it on its own page as “40 inches or taller (about 5 years old)”; that translation is the operator’s, not NICH’s.

Conduct rules inside the cave

NICH publishes these as site rules: no jumping or running inside the cave; no climbing or touching cave formations; no loud noise, shouting or music inside the cave or along the trails; no trash left along the trails or inside the cave.

What the tour costs

Two independent San Ignacio operators publish exactly the same group price. MayaWalk also publishes a private-tour rate, US$250 per person; the Pacz Tours page we read prices the group tour only, and we are not characterising what it does or does not offer beyond that.

MayaWalk includes cave entrance and exploration with a licensed guide, helmets and life jackets, a Belizean lunch (rice and beans with chicken, plantain, salad, dessert, drink) and transport from its office at #19 Burns Avenue, San Ignacio. It limits groups to 6 guests per guide and applies the 40-inch minimum height.

Pacz Tours includes a professional licensed guide, round-trip transportation, entry fees to the cave, gear (helmet, headlamp, lifejacket), a picnic lunch and water. It also caps groups at 6 guests per guide.

Both operators bundle the NICH entrance fee into the price — Pacz lists “Entry fees to the cave” among its inclusions and MayaWalk lists “cave entrance and exploration with licensed guide”. So the BZ$60 non-resident fee is not normally a separate cash payment at the cave.

The camera ban, and where sources disagree about its scope

NICH’s published rule names “cameras, video equipment, or recording devices”. Both operators restate the ban, and one of them states it more broadly:

• MayaWalk Tours: “Government of Belize has banned all Electronics from the cave” and “cameras are not allowed”.
• Pacz Tours: “No cameras allowed inside the cave to protect cultural heritage”.

So the authority’s wording covers cameras, video and recording devices, while one operator tells its guests all electronics are banned. We are printing both rather than reconciling them — check with the operator you book. The operators we checked sell no photo-permit workaround.

Why the ban exists. Cameras were banned effective Friday, May 4, 2012, after two incidents: a visitor knocked a tooth out of the skull of the famous female skeleton, and a tourist dropped his camera onto the skull itself and shattered the back of it. The Belizean outlet Ambergris Today reported at the time that the restriction followed a recommendation from the Cayo Tour Guide Association, with letters of notification sent out, and that any exemption required permission from NICH.

Two numbers in circulation that NICH does not support

Visitors per guide — 8. NICH publishes “Maximum of 6 visitors allowed per Tour Guide”, and both MayaWalk and Pacz advertise a maximum of 6 guests per guide. A third-party guide site publishes 8 as the maximum. NICH’s own page carries nothing that supports 8. We are printing both figures and leaving the disagreement where we found it.

A daily visitor cap. A third-party guide site states one — 125 people a day. NICH’s own visitor-rules page publishes no daily cap at all: it sets group-size and timing rules and no daily number. We looked for one and there is not one to quote, so the third-party figure is unsupported at the authority and we are not repeating it as a rule.

The site itself

Actun Tunichil Muknal is at Teakettle Village, Cayo District. NICH’s archaeological-site record gives the reserve as 520.8 acres and the cave length as 3.13 miles, with Maya use dated A.D. 300–600. A guided tour covers only part of that 3.13 miles.

What the operators don’t publish

These are gaps in what NICH and the tour operators publish, not ours:

• A NICH-published daily visitor cap. The ticket page carries group-size and timing rules and no daily number.
• A NICH-published minimum age. NICH sets a 40-inch height requirement instead; the “age 8” and “ages 5–7 case by case” figures circulating in guide writing appear on no NICH page we fetched.
• The statutory instrument or Institute of Archaeology regulation behind the camera ban. Only NICH’s site rules and the 2012 press coverage were located.
• Any published process for obtaining a photography exemption. The 2012 report says exemptions required NICH permission; no current NICH page describes how to apply.
• Cave water temperature, swim distance, or the length of the hike to the cave entrance, from any authoritative source. The operators describe the tour in general terms only.
• When the BZ$60 non-resident fee took effect, and whether it has changed since. Belize’s archaeological-reserve fee increase was announced in a Belize Tourism Board document dated December 2023, but that fee-schedule PDF is a scanned image we could not parse, so we could not verify when the increase took effect and are not printing a date for it — exactly as we handle it on our Xunantunich page. The store price above is current as we read it on 26 August 2026, and we found no NICH change log.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and official sources named below on the date shown; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

On 26 August 2026 we read NICH’s own ATM Cave ticket page and its separate archaeological-site record, and took every rule, hour and fee above verbatim from them. The currency of the fee was confirmed through NICH’s ticket-store API returning the code BZD, not inferred from the “$” symbol. Tour prices, inclusions and departure times come from MayaWalk Tours’ and Pacz Tours’ own tour pages, read the same day. The origin of the camera ban comes from Ambergris Today’s 2012 report, which is a news source and labelled as one throughout.

Where a figure circulating in travel writing is not supported by NICH, we have printed both and said which is which, rather than picking the tidier number.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — comparisons, percentages, multiples, differences, per-night and per-person conversions, running totals and currency conversions. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it. Where an operator or authority publishes a per-person or per-night rate directly, that is their figure and it is attributed to them at the point it appears.

Sources

• NICH — Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave ticket page — entrance fees, the certified-guide requirement, the 6-per-guide limit, the camera ban, hours, last tour and entry cutoff, the liability waiver, physical requirements, conduct rules and amenities.
• NICH — Actun Tunichil Muknal site record — Teakettle Village location, 520.8-acre reserve, 3.13-mile cave length, A.D. 300–600 dating.
• NICH site tickets and the NICH ticket-store API — confirmation that NICH’s store prices are denominated in BZD.
• MayaWalk Tours — ATM Cave tour — US$145 group and US$250 private price, inclusions, 8:00 AM departure, 8–9 hour day, 6-per-guide cap, and its “all Electronics” phrasing of the ban.
• Pacz Tours — Actun Tunichil Muknal — US$145 price, inclusions including cave entry fees, 8:00–8:30 AM departure, ~8 hour day, 6-per-guide cap, 40-inch rule and camera-ban wording.
• Ambergris Today, 9 May 2012 — the May 4, 2012 effective date of the camera ban and the two incidents behind it.
• Belize With Alvin — ATM Cave visitor requirements — the third-party “8 per guide” and “125 people per day” figures.
• Belize Tourism Board fee schedule, December 2023 (PDF) — the archaeological-reserve fee increase document, a scanned image we could not parse, which is why the fee’s effective date is recorded as unverified.

Last verified: 2026-08-26. Fees, hours and tour prices change without notice.

Written by Estuardo Enriquez. This site is independent, carries no affiliate relationship with any operator named here, and is not connected to any previous owner of this domain.