A detailed study of the Hourglass nebula in the M8 star-forming region is presented. The study is mainly based on recent subarcsec-resolution JHKs images taken at Las Campanas Observatory and complemented with archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images and long-slit spectroscopy retrieved from the European Southern Observatory Archive Facility. Using the new numerical code CHORIZOS, we estimate the distance to the earliest stars in the region to be 1.25kpc. Infrared photometry of all the sources detected in the field is given.