Chichén Itzá on Foot

Welcome to Chichén Itzá. We begin here, on the south rim of the Sacred Cenote, because the city is named after this well. The Maya name, Chi'ch'en Itzá, translates as "at the mouth of the well of the Itzá", and this is the well. Northern Yucatán has almost no rivers on the surface: rain seeps through the limestone and flows underground. Where the rock roof collapses, a cenote like this one opens up, about 60 metres across, with sheer walls and green water far below you. For the people of Chichén Itzá this cenote was not for drinking water. It was a place of offerings to the rain god, Chaak. In the sixteenth century the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa wrote that people were thrown in alive here, together with precious objects, and that the practice was still going on when the Spanish arrived. From 1904 the American Edward H. Thompson dredged the bottom and later went down in a diving suit. He brought up jade, gold, copper, pottery, copal incense, textiles and human remains, and almost all of it went to Harvard's Peabody Museum. The Peabody later returned part of the finds to Mexico: gold in 1959 and jade in 1976. The bones, studied later by archaeologists from the Autonomous University of Yucatán, carry marks of violence at the moment of death and of handling of the body afterwards. Many belonged to children and young people. Look south. The broad, straight path leaving the cenote is Sacbé number 1, a white stone causeway that linked this well to the main plaza. Follow it south for about 400 metres. When the great open plaza appears, the low, square platform straight ahead of you is our next stop.

We are now on the northern edge of the Great Platform, the huge artificial terrace that the builders of Chichén Itzá filled and levelled before raising their main buildings on top of it. The low, square platform in front of you is called the Venus Platform. It has stairways on all four sides and no temple on top: it was an open stage. Look at the stone panels on its sides. INAH archaeologists identify in them the sign of the planet Venus, a kind of half star, together with a figure that is part man, part bird and part serpent. On the stairways, the side ramps end in large serpent heads. Venus mattered enormously in Mesoamerica. It is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, and it appears both as a morning star and as an evening star. The Maya tracked its cycle with a precision that still impresses astronomers, and at Chichén Itzá it is linked with Kukulkán, the feathered serpent. From here you have the best front view of El Castillo. This is the pyramid's north side, the only one with serpent heads at the foot of the stairway, which is why archaeologists consider it the main façade. Walk about 100 metres south, straight towards the pyramid, and stop beside the two great serpent heads at the bottom of the stairs. That is our third stop.

These two open-jawed serpent heads mark the start of the north stairway of El Castillo, also called the Temple of Kukulkán. The base rises in nine stepped tiers to about 30 metres including the temple on top, with a stairway on each of its four sides. Kukulkán is the Maya name of the feathered serpent, the same deity that central Mexico called Quetzalcóatl. INAH notes that Kukulkán may also have been a tenth-century ruler who was worshipped as a god after his death. You may have heard the famous count: 91 steps per side, times four sides, plus the platform on top, makes 365, the days of the solar year. It is a neat figure, but the journal Arqueología Mexicana points out that the number of steps partly depends on the twentieth-century restoration, so take it with some caution. What is well documented is what lies inside. Between 1931 and 1936 the Mexican archaeologist José Erosa Peniche dug tunnels and found an older pyramid hidden underneath this one. Its upper temple held a Chac Mool and a jaguar throne painted red and inlaid with jade. In 2016 a team from UNAM and INAH used electrical resistivity imaging and detected a third, even older structure inside the other two. At the March and September equinoxes, in the late afternoon, the sunlight draws a row of triangles on the side ramp of this stairway that join up with the stone head, and thousands of people come to watch. Archaeoastronomers still debate whether the builders planned it. Climbing the pyramid has been banned since 2006. Now turn to the northwest: about 150 metres away you will see a long, low platform covered in carved skulls. Walk over to it.

This long, low platform is called the Tzompantli, a word in Nahuatl, the language of central Mexico, usually translated as "skull rack" or "wall of skulls". Look at its sides. They are covered in rows of skulls carved in stone, stacked one above another, and between them you can find warriors, eagles holding hearts, and serpents. The stairway is on the east side, facing the plaza. In central Mexico a tzompantli was a wooden frame where the real skulls of sacrificed people were displayed, and Spanish chroniclers described the one in Tenochtitlan. Here only the stone base and its carvings have survived. The art historian Virginia Miller, who studied these reliefs, thinks it very likely that heads or skulls were shown on this platform, and that the ritual was tied to the ball game you are about to see. It is a well-grounded reading, though not a certainty. The word and the type of monument come from central Mexico, because Chichén Itzá had close ties with Tula, in today's state of Hidalgo: both cities have serpent-shaped columns, Chac Mool figures and very similar processions of warriors. For decades people spoke of a Toltec conquest. Today many specialists prefer to talk of alliances, trade and people moving back and forth, and the debate is still open. Next to this platform, on its south side, is a smaller one, the Platform of the Eagles and Jaguars, with big cats and birds clutching hearts. Now walk about 80 metres west, to the two tall parallel walls, and step into the court.

You are standing in the largest ball court in Mesoamerica. Chichén Itzá has at least thirteen courts, but none comes close to this one: it is longer than a football pitch. High up in the centre of the two tall walls around you are two stone rings, carved with intertwined feathered serpents. There is a temple at each end of the court, the North Temple and the South Temple, and the Temple of the Jaguars rises on top of the east wall. Walk over to the sloping bench at the foot of the walls. The reliefs show two teams of players in their protective gear. In the middle of the scene a kneeling player has been beheaded, and serpents and a flowering plant spring from his neck, which specialists read as blood turning into life and fertility. Facing him, another player holds a knife and the head. Between them is a ball with a skull that speaks. The scene is repeated on six panels. The ball game was played in Mesoamerica for more than three thousand years, with a solid rubber ball struck with the hips. It did not always end in sacrifice, and nobody knows how often the scene in these reliefs actually happened here. What is clear is that at Chichén Itzá the ball game, war and religion were bound together. If it is not too crowded, try this: clap once or speak in a normal voice and listen to the echo between the walls. Now leave the court the way you came in and cross the great plaza to the east, passing north of El Castillo. Walk about 400 metres to the stepped temple with rows of square columns at its foot.

The stepped temple in front of you is the Temple of the Warriors. It has four tiers and a single stairway, on this west side. At its foot, the square columns are carved with warriors, one on each face, with their weapons and headdresses, and that is how the building got its name. Up at the temple entrance you can make out a Chac Mool, the reclining figure holding a bowl on its belly, and two serpent-shaped columns. The temple cannot be climbed today, so we look at it from here. Much of what you see is the result of one particular excavation. Between 1925 and 1928 the Carnegie Institution of Washington worked here, with the archaeologist Earl H. Morris running the dig. While excavating, the team found an earlier temple inside, now called the Temple of the Chac Mool, with mural paintings. The French painter Jean Charlot copied the reliefs, and the archaeologist and artist Ann Axtell Morris copied the murals. Their report, published in 1931, is still a reference for archaeologists. Look at the façade as well. You will see the long-nosed rain god Chaak and a figure that is part man, part bird and part serpent. The Temple of the Warriors closely resembles the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli at Tula, one more clue to the link between Yucatán and central Mexico that came up at the Tzompantli. Now walk south along the line of columns, about 100 metres. You will enter a forest of stone columns that stretches away to the east.

These rows of columns, some plain and some carved, are what is left of large roofed galleries. The columns once held wooden beams and vaults that have since collapsed, so picture a shaded space, closed overhead and open onto a great square plaza that stretches east and south of here. The name Thousand Columns is modern and approximate. INAH describes this group as a plaza surrounded by colonnaded galleries and temples, among them the building called the Market, the Temple of the Sculpted Columns and the Temple of the Small Tables. The Palace of the Sculpted Columns, on the east side, has finely carved door jambs and columns, and its façades were decorated with geometric designs, human figures and masks of the rain god. Names like Market or Palace were also given by explorers and archaeologists. We do not know what was sold here, if anything, or what the people who used these buildings called them. What this place does show is a way of building that was rare in the Maya world: large halls with columns, very like those at Tula, instead of narrow vaulted rooms. For the next stop we head south. Go back towards El Castillo, pass it on its south side and take the path that leaves the plaza heading south. It is about 500 metres to a pyramid that looks like a smaller version of El Castillo.

This pyramid looks like a miniature El Castillo: it has four stairways, side ramps formed by intertwined serpents, and a temple on top. It is called El Osario, the Ossuary, or the High Priest's Grave, because of what Edward Thompson found here in 1896: a vertical shaft running down from the temple to a small cave beneath the pyramid, with human bones and offerings. Thompson took them for priests' tombs. More recent studies of the cave point instead to ritual deposits. According to INAH, the base has seven stepped tiers, and the upper ones carry panels showing God K, a Maya deity linked to kingship and abundance, surrounded by cacao beans, jewels and fruit. On the temple, two feathered-serpent columns frame the entrance, and an inner pillar shows a bound captive. Beside that figure is a date that epigraphers read as the year 998 of our era. El Osario stands at the centre of a secondary plaza with its own Venus Platform, a round platform and a Platform of the Tombs. A white road, another sacbé, links it with the Great Platform to the north, and another runs east to the Xtoloc cenote, the well that did supply the city with drinking water. Now follow the path south for about 300 metres. Look for a round building raised on two platforms, with a tower that looks like a snail shell cut in half.

This round building is El Caracol, the Snail, also called the Observatory. It takes its name from the spiral staircase that winds up inside the tower, like the inside of a snail shell. The tower stands on two rectangular platforms that are not aligned with each other, and INAH reckons its present form is the result of at least six rebuildings. Why an observatory? In 1975 the astronomers Anthony Aveni, Sharon Gibbs and Horst Hartung published a study of its alignments in the journal Science. They found that the main stairway and some of the tower's windows point to the places on the horizon where Venus sets at its northernmost and southernmost positions. To see the sky above Yucatán's low forest, a tall building like this one made good sense. Not every window has a clear astronomical explanation, as Aveni himself says, but the Venus link is among the strongest in Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy. Look at the façade too: it has masks and human figures framed by feathers. To the north is the Casa Colorada group, connected to El Caracol by a short sacbé. Our last stop is very close. Walk about 150 metres south to the large building whose façades are covered in stone mosaics and long-nosed masks.

This large building, with many rooms side by side, reminded the Spanish of a convent, so they called it Las Monjas, the Nuns. Next to it are the Nunnery Annex and a small, richly decorated building called La Iglesia, the Church. Look at the façade of the Annex: it is covered in masks of Chaak, the rain god, with their long curling noses, and its doorway carries an inscription. This group is older than El Castillo. INAH dates it to between 600 and 800 of our era and places it in the Puuc and Chenes styles, which come from the hills in the west and south of the peninsula. The Puuc style is recognised by its mosaics of cut stone, fretwork and small colonnettes, and it is the same style as at Uxmal. Here, in the southern part of the zone, is the most fully Maya side of Chichén Itzá. In the main plaza, by contrast, you saw the blend with central Mexico that archaeologists call Maya-Toltec. Chichén Itzá stopped building major monuments after the thirteenth century, and the city was largely abandoned by the middle of the fifteenth, although pilgrims kept coming to the Sacred Cenote. Today, according to the 2020 census, more than half a million people speak Maya in the state of Yucatán alone. This is where our walk ends. To leave, head back north the way you came, past El Caracol, El Osario and El Castillo, and follow Sacbé 1 to the Sacred Cenote and the visitor centre. It is about 1.7 kilometres. Thank you for walking Chichén Itzá with me.