The Devil's Cave has many legends...but the most cited one is that it was once used to store perishable goods with ice that was shipped here from San Francisco.
This website (
visit link) has the fullest explanation I could find:
"Legend has it that the devil lives in the Cueva del Diablo and woe be unto anyone foolish enough to enter, as no one has ever escaped alive.
“We were told there was a deep well inside and if we fell into it we would never get out,” remembered Chona Soto Felix. “We were also told it was where the pirates used to hide so people wouldn’t kill them. And we used the cave to scare other little children or each other.”
Others insist it was where ice, fish or meat were stored. Or that the military keeping watch at the top of the Cerro de la Nevería throughout the 19th century stockpiled ammunition. Some say it was a sanctuary for those scaredy-cat federalist soldiers during the Mexican Revolution.
The earliest known story about the cave dates to the 1840s, and is found in a memoir of one of the early Mazatlán settlers from Germany, Adolph Riensch. Oses Cole, author of Las Viejas Calles de Mazatlán and Diccionario Biográfico Genealógico y Histórico, tells us the cave was a “grotto,” open to the sea, where Riensch and his friends enjoyed the vista and the fresh breezes. They used the open ground in front as a place to bowl and during times of fiestas in Olas Altas they decorated it with candles on one side and mirrors and flowers on the other. There was dancing all night and in the morning hours, first the musicians went home, and then “los caballeros y las damas,” with short serenades sung in front of each young lady’s house.
By 1867, the cave had acquired a reputation which well deserved the name “diablo” – but not for the reasons you’d imagine.
On May 12, 1897, an article in El Correo de la Tarde declared, “Existía más terrible que nunca la Cueva del Diablo.” (Nothing exists more terrible than the Cueva del Diablo.) The author wasn’t talking about lurking devils or child-dissolving wells, but the fact that, due to the city’s poor (or non-existent) drainage system, many Mazatlecos used the cave for their “corporeal needs.” Eventually, the city built four wooden “outhouses” to combat the situation. However, they couldn’t control the citizenry from using the ocean as a receptacle for dumping boxes of the same brought from their homes.
Over the years, the cave’s more current history has been that of a flop-house for drunks, a dump for beer bottles, cigarette butts and candy wrappers, and an atmosphere redolent with marijuana fumes.
The cave as it appears today is but a remnant of what it was in the beginning, before the western face of the Cerro de la Nevería was dynamited away to provide the rocks needed to build the malecón. It was gated several years ago with the whimsical face of El Diablo an integral part of the design."