Calakmul

The first thing you notice is the sound. Long before you see any stone, the forest is loud around you. Insects hum in waves. Leaves drop and tick against the ground. Then, from somewhere high in the canopy, a deep roar rolls through the trees. It sounds like a large animal, but it is almost certainly a howler monkey, calling to its neighbours across the forest. Welcome to Calakmul, one of the great cities of the ancient Maya, still wrapped in green.

You are standing in the far south of the Mexican state of Campeche, close to the border with Guatemala. Getting here takes effort. The road runs a long way off the main highway, through low forest, with very few towns along the way. That distance is part of the story. Calakmul was not built at the edge of the Maya world. It was built at its heart, in a region that once held millions of people and is now almost empty of them.

The ruins sit inside the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest protected tropical forests in Mexico. In 2002, UNESCO listed the ancient city as a World Heritage Site. Later, the listing was extended to include the surrounding forest, which makes it one of the few sites recognised for both its culture and its nature. Here, those two things cannot really be separated. The trees grow from the old plazas, and the roots hold the walls together and pull them apart at the same time.

The name Calakmul is modern. In the early 1930s, a botanist named Cyrus Lundell came through this forest while working with the chicle trade — chicle is the tree sap once used to make chewing gum. He saw two large mounds rising near each other and gave the place a Maya name. Ca means two, lak means adjacent, and mul means an artificial mound. So Calakmul simply means two neighbouring mounds. The ancient name was different, and scholars still discuss how to read it.

Those two mounds are the great pyramids known today as Structure I and Structure II. Structure II is the giant. It is one of the largest buildings the Maya ever made, around forty-five metres tall, and very broad at its base. Here is the first surprise. It is not one building. Archaeologists found that it grew in layers over many centuries. Each new ruler built over the work of earlier rulers, so older temples lie sealed inside the newer one, like rings inside a tree.

During the Classic period, roughly the third to the ninth centuries, Calakmul was the capital of a powerful royal family. Researchers call it the Kaan dynasty, or the Snake Kingdom, because its royal emblem was the head of a snake. Inscriptions suggest that this family first ruled from another city to the north, and later moved its seat here. From Calakmul, the snake kings built a network of allies and dependent cities that stretched across much of the Maya lowlands.

Their great rival was Tikal, the famous city now in northern Guatemala. For generations, these two powers competed for control, a little like two superpowers in a long cold war. They rarely met head-on. Instead, they fought through allies and smaller cities. In 562, Tikal suffered a major defeat, and many scholars link that defeat to Calakmul and its partners. After that, Tikal entered a long period with few new monuments, while the Snake Kingdom grew stronger.

The most celebrated snake king was Yuknoom Ch'een, often called Yuknoom the Great, who ruled in the seventh century. Under his rule, Calakmul reached the peak of its influence. Kings in distant cities recorded his name in their own inscriptions, often to show that they ruled with his support. But power did not last. In 695, Tikal won a famous victory over Calakmul, and after this the Snake Kingdom slowly lost its grip on the region.

As you walk, look at the stone slabs standing in front of the buildings. These are stelae, carved monuments that recorded kings, queens, dates and rituals. Calakmul has more stelae than almost any other Maya site — more than one hundred. Here is the second surprise. Many of them are hard to read. The local limestone is soft, and centuries of rain have worn the carvings smooth. In some places you can still make out a figure, a headdress, or a row of glyphs, but much has faded away.

The tombs inside the pyramids held some of the richest finds from the site. Archaeologists recovered mosaic masks made of jade, pieces of green stone fitted together to form a human face. Jade was more precious than gold to the Maya. It was linked to water, maize and life itself. Several of these masks are now displayed in museums in the city of Campeche, far from here. If you see them later, remember that they came from the dark interior of the building in front of you.

Now think about the forest again. When Calakmul was alive, much of this land was open. There were fields, houses, causeways and water reservoirs. The city depended on collecting rainwater, because there are no rivers nearby. After the Maya cities of this region declined, the forest returned. Today, the reserve shelters spider monkeys, howler monkeys, toucans, parrots and the ocellated turkey, a bird with shining blue and copper feathers. Jaguars live here too, though visitors almost never see them.

If you climb Structure II, take your time. The steps are steep and uneven, and the stone can be slippery after rain. At the top, the reward is a view most visitors never forget. The forest spreads in every direction, a flat green sea with no roads or towns in sight. On a clear day, you can see the top of Structure I rising from the trees. Some people say they can make out other ancient mounds on the horizon, small green hills that are not hills at all.

Before you leave, pause in one of the plazas for a moment. Listen to the birds, and to the wind moving through the high branches. Look at the base of the nearest building and notice how the roots grip the stone. This was once a royal capital, full of noise, smoke and ceremony. Now it belongs mostly to the forest. As you walk back along the trail, watch the treetops. The monkeys that called to you on the way in are probably still there, watching you go.