The jungles of the Mayan Riviera on the Caribbean coast are full of authentic ruins, such as Coba, and living Mayan villages. So it's a strange place to plonk down a Mayan theme park: why see fibreglass ruins when you can see real ones? But Xcaret, a massive complex built in 1999 that's part nature preserve and part Mayan Disneyland, attracts more than one million visitors each year. There's a monkey enclosure, a restaurant in a theatre, numerous water activities – from swimming in underground rivers to "snuba diving" (a cross between snorkelling and scuba diving) – and stands selling textiles and stuffed animals. Yes, it's tacky (it serves the mega-resort of Cancún), but it's not entirely lacking authenticity, especially during the Day of the Dead festivities. Ask a kid whether they'd rather spend a day here or at a local cemetery, and you can guarantee they'll choose the option with pools and a boat ride.
The Day of the Dead, or Hanal Pixan in the local Mayan tongue, is the major event of the year at Xcaret. This weekend sees the Life and Death Traditions festival marrying living Mayan culture with historic (and some not-so-historic) re-enactments. During the festival, the park goes a long way to bringing Mayan culture to the Mexican public's eye. (The event is co-sponsored by the Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán and other serious-sounding organizations, such as the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.)
Twenty-four Mayan communities from remote villages set up stalls to sell handmade corn tamales baked in a stone oven and spicy rich mucbil pollo, a traditional Hanal Pixan dish of chicken, achiote (a native shrub) and tamales wrapped in banana leaves and cooked for hours in a hole dug in the ground. Mayan women tend to the steaming pots with their children in tow, chatting to friends from other villages. For dessert, spicy Mexican hot chocolate simmers in a pot. The stalls are open during park hours and though the food isn't included in the pricey entrance fee, at 15 pesos (about 70p) a tamale, it isn't your standard overpriced theme park fare.
But the festival is more than just a food market. A warren of Day of the Dead altars feature morbid yet brilliant tableaux: offerings of paintings, neon skeleton sculptures wearing zoot suits, exquisite marigold arrangements. A long wall glows in the night with lights of a thousand candles, lit in honour of the dead. On a small stage, theatre troupes perform traditional dances and stage plays in Mayan, a language of strangely placed "x"s and the mother tongue of 15% of the population of the Yucatán state of Quintana Roo. There's a black and white photo exhibition of Mayan life in a makeshift gallery. It's hard to picture Disney mounting anything as highbrow and authentic.
Of course, Xcaret is also a theme park so, aside from the Mayan culture, there's a spectacle, too. A cemetery is set up with remarkably realistic-looking graves garlanded with marigolds to attract dead spirits. For scream junkies, there's a tour of the Mayan afterworld – half-ghost ride, half-theology lesson – that wends its ways through ceiba trees (sacred to the Maya) and past a beautiful (man-made) underground river. Ghouls jump out at you, but only to explain, somewhat amicably, the mechanics of Xibalba, the Mayan afterlife. The biggest – and most Disneyfied – spectacle is a massive mardi gras-esque show in an outdoor amphitheatre featuring towering puppets dancing on stilts. If Frida Kahlo had been the artistic director of a circus, it would have looked like this.
Refreshingly, a look around the stands reveals that most of the audience aren't gringos. "A majority of our visitors are Mexican," confirms Iliana Rodriguez, an Xcaret spokesperson, "and many are Mayan." This simple fact makes Xcaret something more than just a colourful theme park and tourist trap. It makes it part of the Mayan experience, too.
• Entrance to the Xcaret festival costs 250 pesos (£11.60) per day. Children under 1.40m, 125 pesos (£5.80). Admission to the theme park is US$69 adults, $34.50 children. Hotel Basico in Playa del Carmen is a small, stylish alternative to the big resorts, with rooms from US$178.
