Palenque

Listen first. Somewhere in the canopy above the ruins, a deep, rolling roar rises and fades. It sounds like a big animal, but it is a howler monkey, small and invisible in the leaves. The air is thick and warm. It smells of wet earth and moss. Underfoot, the grass is soft and damp. Ahead of you, pale limestone temples rise out of a green wall of rainforest. This is Palenque, one of the great cities of the ancient Maya, in the foothills of Chiapas in southern Mexico.

The name you know is not the original one. Palenque comes from Spanish and means something like a fortified enclosure. Inscriptions carved by the city's own scribes give a different name. They called this place Lakamha, which scholars translate as big water. Look around and you will understand why. Streams run down from the hills behind the site. The ground stays wet through much of the year. Water shaped this city as much as stone did, and the builders learned to control it with real skill.

Palenque reached its height during what archaeologists call the Classic period. For the Maya, this ran roughly from the third to the ninth century. In those centuries, dozens of rival kingdoms competed across the lowlands of Mexico and Central America. Each kingdom had its own royal family, its own gods and its own ambitions. Palenque was never the largest of these cities. But its artists and architects produced some of the most refined work in the whole Maya world. Many visitors find it the most graceful site of all.

One man dominates the story here. His name was K'inich Janaab Pakal, often called Pakal the Great. According to the inscriptions, he came to the throne as a boy of about twelve, in the year 615. He ruled for close to seven decades, until his death in 683. That is one of the longest reigns known from the ancient Americas. Under Pakal and his sons, Palenque was rebuilt in stone. Much of what you see today is their vision.

Now turn toward the tall stepped pyramid on the right side of the main plaza. This is the Temple of the Inscriptions. At the top, a small temple holds long carved panels of hieroglyphs. They form one of the longest Maya texts that survives. These panels record generations of royal history. For the scholars who worked to decipher the Maya script during the twentieth century, Palenque was a treasure house. Its texts helped turn mysterious symbols back into readable language.

Here is the first surprise. For more than a thousand years, nobody knew what lay inside this pyramid. In 1952, the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier noticed a stone slab in the temple floor with holes in it. Beneath it, he found a staircase packed with rubble. His team spent several seasons clearing it. At the bottom, deep inside the pyramid, they found a sealed chamber. Inside was the tomb of Pakal himself, his face covered with a mask of jade.

The king lay in a stone sarcophagus under a huge carved lid. The carving shows Pakal at the moment of death, falling into the underworld, with a great sacred tree rising above him. And there is another quiet detail. A narrow stone channel runs from the tomb up the staircase to the temple above. Many scholars believe it was a symbolic path, a way for the dead king's spirit to stay in contact with the living. The tomb itself is usually closed to visitors, to protect it.

Now look at the large complex in the centre of the plaza. This is the Palace, a maze of courtyards, galleries and narrow passages built and rebuilt over many generations. Rising from it is a square tower several storeys tall. Towers like this are very unusual in Maya architecture. Some researchers think it was used to watch the sky, or to look out over the plains to the north. Nobody can say for certain. Walk slowly through the corridors and notice how the light changes from bright to deep shade.

Inside the Palace, look closely at the walls and pillars. You will see traces of stucco, a fine plaster that Palenque's artists shaped into figures and faces. In a few sheltered spots, faint patches of red and blue paint remain. Today the city looks white and grey. But in its prime, many buildings were painted, and red was a common colour. Imagine these walls bright against the green forest. That is closer to how people living here saw them.

The second surprise waits in a modest building beside the Temple of the Inscriptions, known as Temple Thirteen. In 1994, archaeologists found another royal tomb inside. The body of a woman lay in a sarcophagus, covered in bright red cinnabar, a mineral powder used in burials of high status. Because of that colour, she is called the Red Queen. Her identity is still debated. Many researchers think she may have been Pakal's wife, but that has not been proven beyond doubt.

Across the small stream to the east stands the Group of the Cross. Here are three temples on raised platforms, facing a shared plaza. They were built by Pakal's son, Kan Bahlam, after he took the throne. Inside each temple, a carved panel shows the new king with sacred symbols and gods. Together, they connected his rule to the creation of the world. The climb is steep, but from the top you get one of the finest views back across the whole site.

As you walk between buildings, keep in mind how much remains hidden. Archaeologists believe only a small part of the ancient city has been cleared. Hundreds of structures still lie under the forest, covered by soil, roots and trees. Some of those green hills beside the paths are not natural hills at all. They are buildings that the jungle has claimed. Palenque was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the surrounding forest is protected as a national park.

Before you leave, follow the sound of water. The stream that runs through the site was once channelled under the main plaza through a stone aqueduct built by the city's engineers. Downhill, the trail passes small waterfalls and pools, with more ruins half hidden among the trees. It is quieter there. The crowds thin out, and the forest feels closer.

Stop for a moment wherever you are standing now. Look up at the pale stone, the dark leaves and the light coming through the canopy. People walked these same plazas more than a thousand years ago, under the same calls of monkeys and birds. When the city faded in the ninth century, the forest moved back in. Now it is shared again, by visitors, by researchers and by the jungle. Listen once more as you walk away. The forest has not gone quiet.