Mexico Audio Walking Tour

Cholula — part 1: The Largest Pyramid on Earth Is Wearing a Disguise

A gold church crowns a grassy hill that is not a hill. The legend says a giant built it of adobe brick after the flood, and the bricks, it turns out, are real. The biggest pyramid ever raised is right under the grass.

Cholula, sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios viewpoint (pyramid hill)

Cholula — part 2: Eight Kilometers Into the Mountain

Archaeologists could not take the great pyramid apart, so they mined straight through it and found whole pyramids standing in the dark. Six nested structures, only three ever studied, and a center nobody has reached.

Cholula, great Pyramid tunnels / archaeological access area

Cholula — part 3: The Feast That Never Ended

In 1969 a tunnel wall inside the pyramid turned out to be painted: fifty-seven meters of figures raising cups, sealed in the dark for some seventeen centuries. Nobody can name the ceremony they are performing.

Cholula, museum / offering context (listen near pyramid complex)

Codices — The Bonfire of Books, Mani, 1562

On the twelfth of July, 1562, in the town of Mani in Yucatan, a Franciscan friar named Diego de Landa held a ceremony before the mission church. Into the fire went thousands of carved and painted images the Maya had hidden in caves, and with them books: folding screens of fig-bark paper, painted in red and black glyphs, some centuries old, carrying astronomy, prophecy, medicine, dynastic history. By Landa's own count, twenty-seven burned that day.

Codices — The Madrid Codex, the Working Manual That Would Not Die

The longest Maya book left on earth spent three hundred years as two books that had never heard of each other.

Codices — The Paris Codex, the Book of Fates From a Chimney Corner

In 1859, a young French scholar named Leon de Rosny went rummaging through the Imperial Library in Paris and, in a basket of old papers sitting in a chimney corner, found a Maya book.

Codices — The Grolier Codex, the Fake That Turned Out to Be the Oldest Book in the Americas

Sometime in the mid-1960s, the Mexican collector Josue Saenz took a phone call, and then a flight he could never retrace. The men who contacted him put him on a small plane whose compass had been covered with a cloth, flew him to a dirt airstrip in the south of Mexico, and showed him what looters said they had taken from a dry cave in Chiapas, along with a mask and other old things: ten battered pages of a painted bark-paper book. A Maya book, if it was real. Saenz bought it.

Codices — Codex Borgia, the Book the Children Were Burning

The most beautiful painted book of ancient Mexico was rescued from children playing with fire.

Codices — Codex Mendoza, the Emperor's Book the Pirates Took

Around 1541, twenty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish viceroy of Mexico ordered a book made for the most powerful man on earth. Nahua master painters, tlacuiloque trained in the old tradition, painted the history of the Aztec empire in the old picture-writing; a Spanish priest wrote explanations in the margins so the emperor could follow along. The finished manuscript went to the coast, onto a ship, into the Atlantic convoy, bound for Charles V.

Codices — The Florentine Codex, the Banned Encyclopedia of a World

In the plague-struck 1570s, in the college of Tlatelolco on the edge of Mexico City, a team of scholars raced to finish an encyclopedia of a world that was dying around them, twelve books, some two thousand four hundred pages, more than two thousand painted images, written in two languages side by side. Epidemics were emptying the valley as they worked, and the project was, among everything else, a race: against the deaths of the last elders who remembered.

Codices — Bernal Diaz, the Foot Soldier Who Answered the Historians

An old conquistador in Guatemala, half a century after the fact, sat down to describe the morning in 1519 when he first saw Tenochtitlan, and this is what came out of his pen: we were amazed, and said it was like the enchantments in the legend of Amadis, great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.

Mitla — part 1: The Walls Nobody Can Read

More than a hundred thousand hand-cut stones fitted without a smear of mortar, fourteen patterns, no two panels alike. The fretwork of Mitla is either the finest decoration in the Americas or a language still waiting for its key.

Mitla, mosaic walls (Hall of Columns / Palace groups)

Mitla — part 2: The Door the Friars Sealed

A 1674 chronicle says missionaries found a great underground temple here, called it a back door to hell, and walled every entrance shut beneath a church. Then modern instruments were aimed at the exact spot the story names.

Mitla, subterranean chamber area (where accessible)

Mitla — part 3: The Place of the Dead Is Alive

The Great Seer's palace, a column that is said to measure the years you have left, and a working town wrapped around the ruins where Zapotec is still spoken in the market. Mitla never emptied out.

Mitla, courtyard / wide viewpoint

Monte Alban — part 1: Three Hundred Stones Nobody Can Read

They were named the Dancers. They may be slain captives, patients, or named ancestors. Each figure carries glyphs in one of the oldest scripts in the Americas, and no one alive can fully read them.

Monte Alban, Danzantes gallery (Building L)

Monte Alban — part 2: The Arrow That Broke the Grid

One building on this plaza ignores the city's grid entirely, shaped like an arrowhead and plated with conquest records. Anthony Aveni argued it was aimed at a star. The argument is still going.

Monte Alban, Building J

Monte Alban — part 3: The City That Emptied, and the Tombs That Stayed Open

Around 800 CE this mountaintop capital simply stopped, and no one knows why. Yet for centuries afterward, people kept climbing back up, because the city of the dead was still in business.

Monte Alban, Main Plaza viewpoint

Teotihuacan — part 2: The Sinkhole That Opened Into Another World

A 2003 rainstorm opened a hole near the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. Below it lay a tunnel sealed for eighteen hundred years, pools of liquid mercury, and a ceiling built to glitter like stars.

Teotihuacan, near the Temple of the Feathered Serpent / La Ciudadela

Teotihuacan — part 3: The Two Hundred Under the Serpent

Beneath the most famous facade in Teotihuacan lie some two hundred people, hands bound, wearing necklaces of human jawbones. Bone chemistry says they came from across Mesoamerica. Nobody can say who sent them.

Temple of the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl)

Themes — part 1: The Calendar That Counts Past the Universe

A stela at Coba writes the date of creation with twenty extra places, two men landed on 2012 decades before the glyphs could be read, and the count is still running.

Themes — part 2: The Two Stones That Mention the Date

Of thousands of dated Maya inscriptions, only two clearly name December 21, 2012, plus a brick that might. One is broken off right where a god descends. Another surfaced six months before the date.

Themes — part 3: The Night Every Fire Went Out

In 1507 every flame in the Valley of Mexico was extinguished on one November night while priests watched the Pleiades, betting the world's survival on a wheel of 52 years.

Themes — part 4: The Serpent With Feathers Keeps Appearing

A flying serpent bringing wisdom appears in Mexico, Egypt, India, and Greece. Coincidence, archetype, or a memory of someone real? The Toltecs said he had a name.

Themes — part 5: Seventeen Faces and a Book Nobody Can Read

The first colossal Olmec head came out of the ground in 1862 and started an argument that has never stopped: who carved the oldest faces in the Americas?

Themes — part 6: The Debt the Sun Was Owed

A construction crew in Mexico City hit a tower of mortared skulls in 2015. Understanding why it was built means entering a universe where the sun ran on payment.

Themes — part 7: A Map of the World Below

A crystallized skeleton deep in a Belize cave, a nine-level country of the dead, and a civilization that could walk into its own afterlife through the right door.

Uxmal — part 1: The Doorway Aimed at Venus

Nearly every building at Uxmal lines up with the rest of the city. The finest one does not.

Uxmal, governor's Palace terrace viewpoint

Uxmal — part 2: The Pyramid the Dwarf Built in One Night

Here is the story the Maya of this region tell about the pyramid in front of you.

Uxmal, pyramid of the Magician viewpoint

Uxmal — part 3: A Thousand Rain Faces and No Water

Try to count the faces and you will lose count. They stack up the corners of the Nunnery Quadrangle like vertebrae, hooked noses curling into the air, eyes ringed in cut stone, the same face repeated up every corner and across every frieze, here, on the Governor's Palace, on the pyramid, hundreds upon hundreds of them. One face, multiplied past all decoration, on every important building in the city.

Uxmal, nunnery Quadrangle / decorated facades

Teotihuacan, part 10: The Temple the City Buried

The best-preserved facade at Teotihuacan survived because its own city burned it and buried it. Underneath lie two hundred people arranged in what may be calendar numbers.

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, La Ciudadela

Teotihuacan, part 11: The Road Named by Strangers

The Aztecs named this road for the dead, believing its platforms were tombs. Archaeology corrected them, then kept finding the dead anyway. And the whole city tilts to catch the sky.

Calzada de los Muertos

Teotihuacan, part 12: The Mountain With a Twin

The Pyramid of the Moon copies the mountain behind it, and it is seven pyramids deep. Inside the layers: bound captives, wolves, eagles, and a figure standing on eighteen obsidian knives.

Pyramid of the Moon

Teotihuacan, part 13: The Pyramid Finished in 1910

Part of the Pyramid of the Sun was built around the year 200. Part of it was built in 1910, by a dictator's archaeologist, for a party. Underneath both, the original still tracks the sun.

Pyramid of the Sun

Teotihuacan, part 14: The Cave Where the World Was Born?

In 1971 a pit opened at the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun, revealing a passage running beneath it. Doris Heyden read it as an origin cave, the womb of the world. Then it turned out to be man-made.

Pyramid of the Sun, tunnel and cave context

Chichen Itza — part 9: The Well That Answered

Edward Thompson bought an entire ancient city for a few hundred dollars and dredged its sacred well: gold, jade, and the rain god's messengers. The chronicles name one man who went into the water and came back a king.

Sacred Cenote, Chichen Itza

Palenque — part 7: The Cross in the Jungle and the Door Below

A cross carved eight centuries before any Spaniard, a tomb found under four years of rubble, and a stone tube built so a dead king could keep speaking.

Temple of the Cross

Tulum — part 6: The Front Door of the Underworld

Gran Cenote is the entrance to a flooded labyrinth hundreds of kilometers long, where divers found a girl who had waited thirteen thousand years. Above it stands a walled city whose temple still guides boats through the reef, crowned by a diving god no one can name.

Gran Cenote

Oaxaca — part 1: The Richest Tomb in the Americas Has No Name

Gold, pearls, and a skeleton labeled Individual A. The treasure of Tomb 7 may belong to a king, a priestess, or the Mixtec oracle of the dead, and the painted codices may hold her name.

Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca

Michoacan — part 1: Tzintzuntzan, the Empire That Beat the Aztecs

Five round pyramids above Lake Patzcuaro mark the capital of the Purepecha, who crushed an Aztec invasion, cast bronze like no one else around them, and spoke a language related to nothing on the continent.

Zona Arqueologica de Tzintzuntzan

Morelia — part 1: The Aqueduct That Was Never About Water

Morelia's 253 rose-stone arches are the prettiest thing in the city, and they were built as a survival machine during the deadliest famine in colonial Mexico.

Acueducto de Morelia

Guanajuato — part 1: The Granary, the Miner, and the Four Corners

On September 28, 1810, a miner called El Pipila crawled under fire with a stone slab on his back and burned this door. What hung from the building's four corners afterward kept Mexico awake for ten years.

Museo Regional de Guanajuato Alhondiga de Granaditas

Merida — part 1: The Cathedral Built From a City Called Heaven

Merida's cathedral is made of dismantled Maya pyramids, some carvings still visible in the walls, and the town that prophesied the conquest is the same town where the books were burned.

Catedral de San Ildefonso

Puebla — part 1: Five Thousand Books, Open to Anyone Who Could Read

In 1646 Bishop Palafox gave away his library on one condition: anyone who could read could enter. The first public library in the Americas now holds 45,000 volumes, in the country where the Maya books burned at Maní.

Biblioteca Palafoxiana

San Miguel de Allende — part 1: Atotonilco and the Painting That Raised an Army

A desert sanctuary covered in thirty years of frescoes, a copy of the Virgin made to prove copying was impossible, and the September morning in 1810 when an insurgent army carried it off to war.

Santuario de Jesus Nazareno de Atotonilco

Tijuana — part 1: The Stone That Was Here Before the Border

The border wall walks into the Pacific at Playas, and almost nobody notices the white marble obelisk beside it. Monument 258 was the first stone of the entire line, raised on an empty beach in 1851, and the fence had to be built around it.

Monumento 258 / Playas de Tijuana