Mysterious island draws tourists to Mexico

Al Jazeera English correspondent Rachel Levin filed this two-minute report from Mexico City in January 2014, as the Island of the Dolls was becoming an international curiosity. It begins on the canals of Xochimilco, one of the city’s favourite escapes, and then steers into the overgrown chinampa where hundreds of dolls hang from trees and fences.

Levin repeats the account the island’s keepers give visitors: that the uncle of Anastasio, the man who now looks after the place, began collecting dolls about fifty years earlier after finding the body of a drowned girl, fishing them out of the canals and rubbish and hanging them up to protect himself and keep her spirit at bay. A visitor explains the belief that dolls can trap evil spirits, the report notes dolls brought by tourists from as far away as Colombia, Australia and Russia, and a local speaker places the island among Xochimilco’s many legends, from La Llorona to men who turn into animals.

The man the report calls Anastasio’s uncle was Julián Santana Barrera, known as Don Julián, a farmer who lived alone on the island and died in 2001, found in the water near the place where he said the girl had drowned. No record identifies the girl, and the details of her story change from telling to telling. The report’s own closing line is the fairest summary: the island “is definitely not an ancient attraction,” but a modern one built by one man’s grief or fear, and kept going by his family and by tourism.

Its mention of La Llorona is worth noting too. The Weeping Woman is performed every year on the Xochimilco canals in a version that ties her to the Spanish conquest, one of several local forms of a legend told across Mexico and the American Southwest.