Uxmal

Altitude: 12 m (39 ft)

How to get there

By bus from Mérida about 1.5 hours or from Campeche; by car from Mérida 80km/50mi on the MEX 261, from Campeche 152km/94mi on the MEX 261.

The famous Maya site of Uxmal is situated on a plain covered with thick scrub 80km/50mi south of Mérida in the north-west of the Yucatán Peninsula. Although in terms of surface area it is not one of the largest excavation sites in Mexico, Uxmal, with its preponderance of classical Maya-Puuc architecture, lays claim to being one of the most unified and beautiful pre-Columbian sites in the whole country. In 1996 Uxmal was declared by UNESCO a world cultural heritage site. History

It is thought that Uxmal (Maya: "thrice built") was founded by a tribe which had wandered northwards from the area of Petén (in present-day Guatemala) during the 6th c. ad, which falls in the Maya Classic period. The existence of an earlier settlement, possibly in the pre-Classic period, can not be ruled out. The most brilliant architectural period in Uxmal occurred in the 9th and 10th c. Although the Indian chronicles assert that the Xiú, a highland tribe, founded Uxmal around the end of the millennium, the zenith of the settlement's development was by this time already over. It is more likely that the Xiú only settled in or around the deserted settlement of Uxmal in the 13th or 14th c. and, after the destruction of Mayapán in the middle of the 15th c., moved on to Maní, which was their last bulwark against the advance of the invading Spanish.

Fray Alonso Ponce was the first Spaniard to write about Uxmal, which he visited in 1586. In 1836 Jean Frédéric de Waldeck carried out explorations in Uxmal and in 1841 John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood spent some time in the ruined town. The first systematic excavations were undertaken by Frans Blom in 1929. He was followed by Silvanus Morley from the Carnegie Institute in 1941, José Erosa Peniche, and later a whole series of Mexican research initiatives which were conducted by Jorge Acosta, César Saenz and Rubén Maldonado Cárdenas at the end of the 1970s. Today the work is being continued by Alfredo Barrera Rubio and Tomás Gallareta Negr'on.

The ruins

In contrast to Chichén Itzá there is an almost complete absence of Mexican (Toltec) stylistic elements in the architecture in Uxmal, with the result that in Uxmal the Classic Maya architecture in the Puuc style (so named after the chain of hills in the north-west of Yucatán; ad 700-1000) was preserved. This style is characterised by thin limestone cladding in a square or lattice-style pattern on top of smooth walls, a device that replaces the stucco decorations of the Maya Classic period. This ornamentation, which is used to decorate almost exclusively the upper part of a building, is supplemented with panels of Chac masks (the rain god) with long curved noses and snakes with stiff bodies. The picture is completed by rounded stone columns in the entrances and covered columns in long rows.

That part of the Maya town which has been uncovered covers an area of 700 3 800 m (2298 3 2625 ft). As with many other pre-Hispanic sites only a tiny part of the original site has so far been excavated. Uxmal was not, as in the case of other towns in Yucatán, laid out around one or more "cenotes" (underground water deposits), as this type of natural water pool does not exist in this area. The people used to manage with "aguadas" and "chultunes", places where the earth had caved in and then become sealed, or artificially created cisterns, in which rain water was collected. This lack of ground water enabled the rain god Chac to assume his pre-eminent position, evidence of which is provided by the decorations on the buildings.