Palenque
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Less than a tenth of the ancient city has been explored, and more than a thousand structures still lie hidden under the jungle.
- Pakal became king at just 12, after his mother Sak K'uk' had governed for about three years until he was old enough to rule.
- The arch-rival city of Calakmul sacked Palenque twice, in 599 and again in 611, shortly before Pakal's reign began.
- The vaulted Otulum aqueduct runs for more than 100 metres underground beneath the main plaza.
- At a spring called Piedras Bolas, a Maya water channel appears to have built up enough pressure to send a jet up to about six metres high.
- The first written examination of the ruins came in 1773 from Ramón de Ordóñez y Aguilar; a Spanish survey under Antonio del Río followed in 1786.
- The eccentric artist Jean-Frédéric Waldeck lived at the ruins for two years from 1832, drawing the reliefs.
- Désiré Charnay took the first photographs of Palenque in 1858.
- The Palenque Round Table conferences, first held in 1973, produced breakthroughs that let scholars read the names and dates of the city's kings.
- In 1831 Juan Galindo was the first to note that the figures in Palenque's art resembled the region's living Indigenous people.
Why it is worth it
Palenque is the Maya city that most makes you feel the forest pressing in. Its temples of pale limestone sit on a shelf at the foot of the Chiapas hills, with dense green canopy climbing behind them and streams running through the site. The city's ancient name, Lakamha, means "big water", and it suits the place: the builders channelled the Otulum stream under the main plaza through a vaulted stone aqueduct, a piece of hydraulic engineering you can still see. People lived here from the last centuries BC, but the city reached its height in the seventh century AD and was abandoned before the end of the eighth, leaving its buildings to the jungle for centuries before visitors from Europe began to study them.
Palenque's greatness is bound up with one ruler, K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who reigned for 68 years, from 615 to 683. His funerary pyramid, the Temple of the Inscriptions, begun around 675, rises about 27 metres in eight steps topped by a temple and takes its name from the long hieroglyphic panels in the shrine at the top, with more than six hundred glyphs one of the longest Maya inscriptions known. In 1952 the archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier noticed that a floor slab in the temple could be lifted, and after years of clearing a rubble-filled stairway he reached Pakal's tomb deep inside the pyramid: a carved sarcophagus lid showing the king at the threshold between worlds, and a body adorned with a jade mask and the richest jade offerings then known from any Maya burial. In the neighbouring Temple XIII, a second burial found in 1994 belonged to a noblewoman whose remains had been covered with red cinnabar, now known as the Red Queen.
Across from the pyramid spreads the Palace, a maze of courtyards, galleries and corbel-vaulted rooms on a platform roughly 97 by 73 metres, crowned by a four-storey tower unlike anything else in Maya architecture, often thought to have served for watching the sky. The stucco reliefs and carved panels here, and in the Cross Group of three temples raised by Pakal's son Kan Bahlam, are among the most refined sculpture the Maya produced. The site and the surrounding rainforest were declared a national park in 1981 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1987 as the Pre-Hispanic City and National Park of Palenque.
Getting there
The ruins lie about 7 km from the town of Palenque in northern Chiapas. Frequent colectivo vans run between the town centre and the site entrance in about 15–20 minutes. Palenque town is also a stop on the Tren Maya railway, whose station opened at the end of 2023, and ADO buses connect it with Villahermosa in roughly two and a half hours. The nearest major airport is Carlos Rovirosa Pérez International Airport (VSA) in Villahermosa, about 99 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Palenque, also anciently known in the Itzaʼ language as Lakamha, was a Maya city-state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins date from ca. 226 BC to ca. 799 AD. After its decline, it was overgrown by the jungle of cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees, but has since been excavated and restored. It is located near the Usumacinta River in the Mexican state of Chiapas, about 130 km (81 mi) south of Ciudad del Carmen, 150 meters (490 ft) above sea level. It is adjacent to the modern town of Palenque, Chiapas. It averages a humid 26 °C (79 °F) with roughly 2,160 millimeters (85 in) of rain a year.
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