Jaguar Inn, Tikal.

Only three hotels are licensed to be within the Tikal National Park. These are the Jungle Lodge (Posada de la Selva), the Hotel Tikal Inn, and the Jaguar Inn.

On this page we cover the Jaguar Inn at Tikal. Elsewhere we will be describing the Jaguar Inn of Santa Elena (Flores area). The Jungle Lodge is covered extensively elsewhere in the FLAAR network of sites on Maya archaeology.

The two Jaguar Inns (Tikal and Santa Elena) are both owned and operated by the Solis family. Paty de Solis was a well known guide for years before her tragic death in an airplane accident. Her husband, Edmundo Solis, was in charge of Aviateca airlines airport at Tikal in the decades when the airfield was within the park. Thus Edmundo Solis was a long time personality during the time of the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project. Today the two hotels are run by the next generation; Ed runs the Jaguar Inn in Tikal.

The advantage of the hotels in Peten is almost all are still run by the very families that built them at their beginning. These are hard working families and this means you and your belongings are safe in their hotels (other than from other tourists, which is actually more of a theft problem than from hotel staff who have a good reputation to maintain).

The Jaguar Inn is also a favored restaurant. I have eaten many meals here and never suffered any ill effects. Keep in mind that none of the eating places in the Peten are "fast food" restaurants, so be sure to allow enough time for a leisurely meal.

The Jaguar is near the Tikal museum of artifacts, alongside the former airfield within the park (the airfield within the park has been closed for years since the international airport was opened).

You can camp at the Jaguar Inn, or use their own tents, or sleep in the four-bed dorm. Most of the other facilities are the traditional cabin, called bungalows here. As typical for the Peten, electricity is available for a few hours in the evening.