El Viajero

Despite what Lonely Planet’s book on Yucatán says about Uxmal’s Casa del Advino (Magician’s House) (“it gives a rather bad first impression of Uxmal to the visitor” [p. 173]), this is one of the most impressive sites I’ve seen in the Mayan world. The photo above was taken from the Palacio del Gobernador (Governor’s Palace), which is itself impressive with its largely intact Puuc facades.

Anyway, back to the Casa. It was quite typical in much of Meso-America to build structures on top of existing ones, especially the larger pyramids. There appears to be some debate on the whys and whens, but I have heard numerous times that many of the add-ons were put up based on the Mayan life cycle of 52 years. What you see in the photo above is the fifth of these structures. It has been and is being restored. I climbed it in 1990, but now it is closed. The backside is in the midst of reconstruction, and you can currently see inside some of the exposed layers.

There is more to see at Uxmal, and the Puuc region. Time permitting, I’ll post more. Oh yeah, regardless of my disagreement of the comment in the book above, it helped us get around to many places and filled in several gaps we would have otherwise missed.

The observatory/snail shell is one of my favorite man-made creations on the planet. One look at the shape makes it clear what its purpose was. Despite what our guide told us (that it was “just used to watch the stars, not the planets”), it was used by the astronomer-priests to measure the movements of the stars and planets (a week before I visited there was a show on TV about how this structure was used to measure the various locations of Venus in the night sky).

I’ll leave it to your searching techniques to explore the various thinking on the sources of the architecture, but the Caracol seems to have elements of Toltec, Puuc and Maya. Unlike most of the structures at Chichén, you can walk up the two flights of stairs, but you can no longer climb inside the Caracol. I’m not sure when this was stopped (it was not allowed in 1990 either), but I did go up it in 1985. It has a spiral stone staircase with a very narrow passageway. I had to get really small to get in there, but at the time I knew I was doing something that would not be continued. There was just too much damage to the top of the structure.

I did my best to focus on the structure itself in the photo, but I have to say that the crowds were completely overwhelming on this day! When I visited in 1985 and 1990 (both in the summertime), there were relatively few people and no vendors along the pathways. This time the pathways were half-blocked by locals hawking t-shirts and carved goods laid out on blankets. Seeing all of this took away from the awesome and mysterious experience that is Chichén. Caveat salutor!