Chichén Itzá: a New World Wonder
The Mayans were a highly developed civilisation. Their empire, hidden in the rainforest, consisted of huge palaces and imposing pyramids. Although they had settled on the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico much earlier, they perfected their construction techniques around the year 900 A.D. The most important city in Yucatán dates back to this period: Chichén Itzá. Come explore this famous and beautiful Mayan city.
The Popol Vuh, the sacred religious book from the Classic Era of Mayan civilization, contains their story of creation. The Mayan gods created the earth, heaven and sun. They made people out of corn: muscles from corncobs, limbs from corn dough, the human mind from corn flour and human blood from corn juice. The corn people immediately left their mark on the world – somewhat hesitant at first with modest burial mounds, but much more elaborately after this, with complete cities filled with palaces, temples and pyramids and, later on, sophisticated structures covered with highly ornate decorations.
A majestic Mayan city
The Mayans were a highly developed society, with a strong culture of art and handicrafts, trade and science. They were particularly competent in mathematics and astronomy, independently inventing the number 0. Without computers or calculators, they created a unique phenomenon that takes place here 2 days a year: during the spring and fall equinox, the edge of the shadow from the sun is cast on the pyramid like a serpent slithering down the stairs.
That serpent, found in many adornments at Chichén Itzá, represents Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, alias the ‘Feathered Serpent’. Around the turn of the last millennium, he ruled the Mayan empire and was later worshiped as a Mayan god under the name Kukulcán. He developed Chichén Itzá into a glorious capital city, with a market, holy spring, ball playing field, bathhouse, sacrificial altar and convent, an observatory in the shape of a snail’s shell and countless temples and palaces - the one structure more elaborately decorated than the other, with hieroglyphics and sculpted animals and gods, including the omnipresent rain deity Chac with his crooked nose. An entire day should be set aside in order to experience the grandeur of Chichén Itzá at its fullest.