Guinness World Records recognised this place in 2022 as holding the world's largest collection of haunted dolls, which is a category somebody had to invent.
The Island of the Dolls is a chinampa, a floating garden plot, in the Laguna de Tequila among the channels of Xochimilco south of central Mexico City. Hundreds of dolls of every style and colour hang across it.
One man put them there. From the mid-20th century Don Julián Santana Barrera collected dolls and hung them around the small island. He lived there as a recluse, and the legends attached to the island are legends about him. He is said either to have come across the body of a girl floating in the canals or to have failed to save her from drowning, and to have found a doll drifting there the next day.
The island had already been on film before any of that spread. The Mexican director Emilio Fernández used it as a location for María Candelaria in 1943.
Barrera died in 2001, and his family opened the island to the public. Alongside the dolls there are three huts and a small museum holding local newspaper articles about the island and about him. The one-room hut he slept in still displays the first doll he collected, and Agustina, his favourite.
Getting there is half of it. The island is roughly 28 km south of Mexico City in the Xochimilco canals, reached by the gondola-like boats called trajineras, and the round trip runs about three to four hours. Most rowers will take you; some refuse, out of superstition. The journey usually takes in the Ecological Area, the Ajolote Museum, the Apatlaco Canal, the Teshuilo Lagoon and Llorona Island.
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