Tajín Veracruz
El Tajín
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- No European recorded El Tajín until 1785, when official Diego Ruiz stumbled on the Pyramid of the Niches while searching for illegal tobacco fields.
- Its builders poured cement roofs nearly a metre thick, lightened with pumice and pottery shards, a technique found nowhere else in ancient Mesoamerica.
- Impressions of baskets and tamale wrappers are still preserved in the dried cement of the city's ancient roofs.
- Building B in Tajín Chico is the site's only two-storey structure; elsewhere in Mesoamerica such construction is known only from the Maya region.
- About twenty ballcourts have been found at El Tajín, the last three in 2013, more than at any other Mesoamerican city.
- Carved panels on the South Ballcourt show a ballplayer being sacrificed by decapitation so that he can ask the gods for pulque for his people.
- The Pyramid of the Niches was originally painted dark red, with the niches picked out in black to deepen their shadows.
- The largest stone in the Pyramid of the Niches is estimated at about eight tonnes, yet the blocks fit so closely that little mortar was needed.
- Local Totonac belief holds that twelve old thunder deities, known as the Tajín, still live among the ruins and gave the city its name.
- Archaeologist José García Payón excavated the city for 39 years until his death in 1977, and still only about half of it has been uncovered.
Why it is worth it
El Tajín's central pyramid isn't decorated with niches so much as built out of them: 365 rectangular recesses are cut into its seven receding tiers, one for very nearly every day of the solar year, with twelve more worked into the main staircase's cornice. Archaeologists think the niches functioned as depositories for offerings, and the geometry is precise enough that individual niches throw distinct shadow patterns at the solstices and equinoxes — this is a calendar you can walk around, not just look at.
The Totonac people who built El Tajín carried the same calendrical obsession into performance. The Danza de los Voladores — the Dance of the Flyers — still practiced today, sends four performers up a 30-metre pole to spiral down on ropes wound around it, each completing exactly 13 rotations on the way down. Multiply that by the four flyers and you get 52 total rotations, matching the 52-year cycle that anchored the wider Mesoamerican calendar system: a piece of ritual acrobatics that is, among other things, a physical demonstration of a number.
Taken together, the pyramid and the ritual say the same thing two different ways — this was a culture that built its most important structures and its most dangerous performances around getting the count of days and years exactly right, not as symbolism layered on afterward but as the actual organizing logic of the architecture.
Good to know
The Danza de los Voladores is a living Totonac tradition still performed by local practitioners in the Papantla area, not a historical reenactment staged only for the ruins.
Getting there
6 km from Papantla de Olarte. El Tajín National Airport (PAZ) is about 19 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
El Tajín is a pre-Columbian archeological site in Veracruz, Mexico and is one of the largest and most important cities of the Classic era of Mesoamerica. A part of the Classic Veracruz culture, El Tajín flourished from 600 to 1200 AD and during this time numerous temples, palaces, ballcourts, and pyramids were built. No European seemed to have known of its existence until 1785, when a government inspector chanced upon the Pyramid of the Niches.
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