Toniná

The road from San Cristóbal to Toniná passes through the Ocosingo Valley, and the valley itself is something. A wide, flat-bottomed basin ringed by mountains, green in the rainy season to a degree that feels saturated, it was Zapatista territory in January 1994 and still carries those memories in the lowered voices of older people when the subject comes up. The town of Ocosingo, fifteen kilometers from the ruins, is a market town with excellent quesillo — the stringy Oaxacan-style cheese that is produced here in great quantities and served on everything. I ate it in a quesadilla from a woman at the market who also sold it by the kilo, pressed into rounds, the fresh ones sweating gently in the morning heat.

Toniná sits on a low hill above a river plain, and the approach through the site museum is quiet enough that when the main pyramid comes into view it hits harder for the lack of preparation. It is not graceful in the way Palenque is graceful. It is massive, blunt, and vertical — seven stepped terraces rising about seventy-five meters from the plaza floor, constructed between roughly the third and tenth centuries, and one of the tallest pre-Columbian structures in Mexico by terrace count if not by absolute height. The Maya who built it were warriors. The site’s inscriptions record more captive nobles than any other site of its size, and the sculptures — many of them now in the excellent onsite museum — are some of the most viscerally striking in the Maya world.

Climbing the main pyramid takes perhaps twenty minutes if you do not stop, and I always stop. Each terrace reveals a different view of the Ocosingo Valley below and the surrounding mountains, and at the top the scale of the construction becomes more comprehensible by being impossible to comprehend from below. The last known Long Count date recorded on any Maya monument — 10.4.0.0.0, corresponding to 909 CE — was inscribed here, at Toniná. The site was not abandoned; it appears to have continued functioning into the Terminal Classic period, and what it recorded on its final monument was, effectively, the last entry in a calendar system that had been running continuously for over a millennium. Standing on the summit pyramid with that fact in mind is a quietly devastating experience.

The museum at the base is worth every minute. It houses the Mural of the Four Eras, a complex stucco frieze depicting creation cycles, lords of death, and decapitation scenes with a compositional confidence that is genuinely arresting — not because violence is interesting but because the aesthetic control is remarkable, the figures posed with a precision that centuries of burial in the earth have only slightly softened.

I had the site almost to myself on a Tuesday morning in December. The guard at the base was reading a paperback. Three school-age children were running along the lower terraces at a speed that made me anxious but did not seem to concern anyone else. The howler monkeys in the forest behind the pyramid were louder than anything human.

When to go: November through March. The site is open year-round but the unpaved access road from Ocosingo becomes difficult in heavy rains. Combine with a morning in Ocosingo market for the quesillo and the general pleasure of a functional Chiapas market town. Toniná receives a fraction of Palenque’s visitor numbers, which means you can take your time on the pyramid.