Teotihuacan

Long before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan was already a ruin they could only guess about. The Nahuatl name they gave it is usually translated as the place where the gods were born, and in their cosmology it was here that the present sun had been created. The real builders left no readable account of themselves: nobody knows for certain what language they spoke, and the city's own name for itself survives only in Maya inscriptions, which call it a place of reeds. What is clear from excavation is its scale. Settled from around 100 BCE, it grew in the first centuries CE into the largest city in the Americas, with most estimates placing its peak population near 100,000 people living in stone apartment compounds laid out on a grid.

The centre of the site is the Avenue of the Dead, a ceremonial axis more than two kilometres long lined with stepped platforms in the local talud-tablero style, a sloping base topped by a vertical panel that spread across Mesoamerica as a Teotihuacan signature. At its north end rises the Pyramid of the Moon; on its eastern side, the Pyramid of the Sun, finished by about 100 CE and among the largest pyramids ever built, measuring over 200 metres along each side of its base and around 65 metres high. To the south the Ciudadela encloses the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the political and religious heart of the early city. The main axis is deliberately skewed from true north, an orientation researchers link to sunrise and sunset dates separated by multiples of the 13- and 20-day periods of the Mesoamerican calendar. A tunnel found beneath the Feathered Serpent temple in 2003 has since yielded tens of thousands of offerings, including greenstone figures and pyrite-dusted walls meant to glitter like a night sky.

The city's end is still debated. Around 550 CE the palaces and temples along the main avenue were burned while outlying housing was largely spared, which points to an uprising against the elite rather than a foreign attack; drought and famine in the mid-sixth century probably fed the crisis. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 and draws well over a million visitors a year.

Getting there

The archaeological zone lies about 1.8 km from the town of Teotihuacán de Arista and roughly 40 km northeast of central Mexico City. The closest airport is Felipe Ángeles International (NLU), 18.8 km away; Mexico City's Benito Juárez International (MEX) is about 37 km. Autobuses Teotihuacanos run a regular service from Mexico City's Terminal Central de Autobuses del Norte to the pyramids.