Bonampak

Bonampak is a modest Maya site in eastern Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, but one building there holds the most complete set of paintings to survive from the Classic Maya world. Structure 1, the Temple of the Murals, is a three-room building 16 metres long and about 7 metres high on a T-shaped platform. Every surface inside was painted — walls, vaults, even the black floors — with some 281 human figures, many of them labelled with glyphic captions, telling a single story from court ceremony to battle to sacrifice and celebration.

The murals were made around AD 790, when Bonampak was a dependency of the larger city of Yaxchilan, some 30 km to the north on the Usumacinta River. Read in order, Room 1 shows the presentation of the young heir Chooj before the court, with dancers in towering feather back-racks and musicians with drums, rattles and turtle shells. Room 2, the largest, holds what has been called the greatest battle scene in Maya art. Victorious warriors wear jaguar elements and seize their enemies by the hair. Defeated fighters are painted left-handed and dressed in bird regalia, and on the north wall captives sit bleeding at the feet of the ruler Yajaw Chan Muwaan. Room 3 shows the victory rites: nobles dancing with quetzal-feather headdresses, women of the court drawing blood from their tongues with stingray spines. A tomb found beneath Room 2 in 2010 held a man buried with jade ornaments and a stone knife.

The paintings were seen by outsiders only in 1946, when local Lacandon Maya, who still came to the ruins to pray, guided American visitors there; the photographer Giles Healey was the first to be shown the painted rooms. From 1996 a Yale University team led by Mary Miller recorded the murals with infrared photography, recovering glyphs and details no longer visible to the eye. The site's history before the murals is one of rivalry: in the 5th and 6th centuries Bonampak lords were repeatedly captured by Yaxchilan, and by about 600 the city had become its satellite. Its Great Plaza also holds Stela 1, an almost six-metre portrait of the ruler carved from a single thin slab, among the tallest stelae in the Maya region. Bonampak fell into decline with Yaxchilan in the 9th century.

Getting there

The town of Tenosique is about 93 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport by distance is Mundo Maya International Airport (FRS) at Flores in Guatemala, about 130 km away across the border; within Mexico the usual approach is by road from Palenque, which has its own airport (PQM), while Tuxtla Gutiérrez's Ángel Albino Corzo International Airport (TGZ) is about 210 km away.