Bonampak

Listen first. The Lacandon forest surrounds this clearing on every side. Howler monkeys may call from the canopy, a deep roar that carries a long way through the trees. The air is heavy and wet, and it smells of leaf rot and warm earth. Under your feet, the grass of the open plaza is soft and green. Ahead, grey limestone terraces climb a hillside towards a cluster of small temples. It looks quiet and modest. But one of those small buildings holds one of the great treasures of the ancient Americas.

This is Bonampak, a Maya city in the eastern lowlands of Chiapas, in Mexico. It sits in the Ocosingo Municipality, close to the Usumacinta River, which today forms part of the border with Guatemala. Bonampak was never one of the giant capitals of the Maya world. It was a smaller kingdom, and for long periods it lived in the shadow of its powerful neighbour, Yaxchilan, a short distance away along the river. Its rulers married into that greater court, fought beside it, and sometimes answered to it.

The name you hear today is not the ancient one. Scholars gave the site the name Bonampak in the twentieth century, using words from Yucatec Maya, a Maya language spoken further north. It means, roughly, painted walls. That name tells you exactly why people travel this far into the forest. The buildings here are fine, but the paint is the reason the world knows this place. And the paint survived by something close to luck.

Here is the first surprise. For more than a thousand years, the outside world did not know about these paintings. The Lacandon Maya, whose communities still live in this forest, knew the ruins well. In 1946, local Lacandon men led an American photographer named Giles Healey to the buildings, and he saw the murals. The news travelled fast. Archaeologists, artists and journalists soon came to see a full painted world that no one outside the forest had imagined.

Before you climb, walk to the centre of the Great Plaza. Here stands a tall carved stone slab, a stela, one of the largest found anywhere in the Maya region. It shows a ruler in full ceremonial dress, holding a staff of office. Maya kings raised stelae like this to record their reigns, their rituals and their victories. Look at the depth of the carving, and at how the figure fills almost the whole surface. It was made to impress anyone who walked into this plaza.

Now look up the slope. The Acropolis rises in broad stone terraces and stairways, with temples set along the upper levels. Take the stairs slowly. The steps are steep and uneven, and the stone can be slippery after rain. As you climb, the plaza opens behind you and the forest wall closes in around the edges. On one of the lower terraces stands a low building with three doorways. This is Structure 1, often called the Temple of the Murals.

The building has three separate rooms, side by side. Each room has its own doorway and no internal connection to the others. Inside, almost every surface was painted: the walls, the benches, and the vaulted ceilings that narrow towards the top. The paintings date to the late eighth century, during the reign of a Bonampak king called Yajaw Chan Muwaan. Together, the three rooms tell a single story about his court, a war, and the celebrations that followed.

The first room shows the court. Nobles in white robes stand in rows. Musicians play drums, rattles and long trumpets. Dancers wear tall headdresses of green feathers. Scholars read the scene as a ceremony that presents a young heir to the assembled lords. Look for the small details: masked performers, a figure holding a parasol, nobles turning to talk to one another. This is not a stiff list of kings. It feels like a real event, full of people and noise.

The second room is very different. It shows a battle, painted as a dense crush of warriors with spears, shields and jaguar skins. Then, on another wall, comes the aftermath. Captives sit or sprawl on a stairway below the victorious king. Some of them have bleeding hands. This is the second surprise for many visitors. For a long time, people imagined the ancient Maya as a peaceful society of astronomers and priests. The paintings in this room helped change that picture.

The third room returns to ceremony. Dancers in enormous costumes turn and spin. Members of the royal family appear in a ritual of bloodletting, an offering of their own blood that Maya nobles made to the gods and ancestors. The story ends with celebration and sacrifice together. Taken as a whole, the three rooms move from court, to war, to ritual. Some scholars think the cycle may never have been fully finished, though the reason for that is uncertain.

The colours deserve your full attention. The painters worked on wet lime plaster, so the pigment became part of the wall. Look for the deep red backgrounds and the turquoise blue known as Maya blue, a pigment made from clay and plant dye that is remarkably stable. Over the centuries, water seeped through the limestone and left a thin mineral crust over the paint. That crust hid the murals, but it also protected them. Some early efforts to make the colours easier to see caused lasting damage.

Inside, you share a small space with fragile art. Only a few people can enter each room at a time, and guards ask visitors not to use flash. Give your eyes a moment to adjust to the low light. Then look slowly, panel by panel, from the benches up to the ceiling. Large parts of the paint are faded or lost, so the scenes may feel incomplete. Even so, the faces, the hands and the feathers still show the skill of artists working more than a thousand years ago.

When you leave the temple, stand for a moment on the terrace outside. Below you is the plaza with its great stela. Around you is the forest that hid all of this for centuries, and that still belongs to the Lacandon communities who first guided outsiders here. Listen again for the birds and the monkeys. As you walk down the steps, remember the musicians and dancers inside those small rooms. They are still holding their poses in the dim light behind you.