Reporte vial y choque de Metrobús en La Merced

What does “socavón” mean in Spanish?

A socavón is a sinkhole: the ground giving way to leave a crater, usually under a road. The word is built from the verb socavar — to dig away at, to undermine — plus the augmentative -ón, so it names the big hollow that gets dug out from below. It is the headline word every time a street collapses, and it carries a faint sense of something eaten away from underneath.

Socavar works figuratively too: water can socavar a foundation, and rumors can socavar someone’s authority. So the noun socavón quietly tells you what happened — something was undermined until it caved. Spanish has bache for a small pothole, but a socavón is the dramatic, swallow-a-car kind, and it dominates Mexican and Latin American news whenever a burst water main opens the asphalt.