Xpujil / Río Bec Zone

The drive to the Río Bec sites from Campeche City takes three and a half hours across the southern Yucatán Peninsula, through flat jungle that gets incrementally denser and less interrupted. The highway is good until it isn’t, and then you turn off onto roads through the trees toward sites that receive, depending on the season, between a few dozen and a few hundred visitors a day total. I arrived at the cluster of sites on two days in February with nobody ahead of me in the queue and, on the second day at Chicanna, nobody else the entire time I was there.

This is not how I experience most Maya archaeology. At Chichén Itzá you are processed through with a crowd the size of a small town, your photographs of El Castillo containing the backs of heads in every direction, the vendors dense at the entrance and along the sacbeob between structures. The Río Bec sites are what Maya archaeology looked like before that economy existed, which is either their best feature or simply the consequence of being deep in the jungle of southern Campeche in a state that few tourists extend their itinerary to reach.

The Towers That Cannot Be Climbed

The Río Bec architectural style is unusual enough that it gets its own category in the taxonomy of Maya building traditions, and the thing that makes it unusual is also the thing that makes it slightly strange to look at when you know what you’re looking at.

The style features towers — steep, elaborately ornamented structures that appear to be temple-pyramids with narrow stairs climbing the face to a temple at the top. They look exactly like the pyramids at Tikal or Calakmul. They look, in fact, precisely like the most iconic form of Maya architecture. They are not. The stairs are decorative: too steep and narrow to climb, their treads shallow to the point of being symbolic. The temples at the summit are solid masonry, not accessible interiors. The towers at Xpujil, Río Bec, and the surrounding sites are elaborate architectural illusions — facsimiles of power, or assertions of it, built in the form of the thing they wanted to claim.

I find this either profound or troubling depending on the hour. The architects who built these structures understood perfectly well what a functional temple-pyramid looked like. They chose to build the appearance of one instead, at immense labor and material cost. Whether this was theological statement, political theater, or something for which we don’t have an adequate category, I cannot say. The academic literature hedges. I stood at the base of the Xpujil towers for a long time trying to find the seam where the intention was legible, and did not find it.

Becan, and the Moat

Becan is the most substantial site in the Río Bec region by area, and it has a feature unique in Maya archaeology: a defensive moat. The moat is dry now and partially overgrown, but it is unmistakably a moat — a ditch dug around the city’s core perimeter, clearly intended to make approach difficult. This is not the architectural statement of a culture that felt secure about its neighbors. Becan’s defensive infrastructure suggests a period of sustained regional conflict, which is consistent with what the archaeological record from the Classic period in this part of the Yucatán indicates.

There were three other visitors at Becan when I arrived — a couple and one solo man with an extremely serious camera — and we distributed ourselves across the site with the instinctive spacing of people who have each come for the quietness. I climbed the main structure, which is substantial and has a real interior with corbel-arched rooms, and looked out over the jungle in every direction. From that height the flatness of the Campeche jungle is visible as a single green continuity that stretches to the horizon in every direction without interruption. This is not a landscape that feels small.

Chicanna and the Mouth

Chicanna is the showpiece of the Río Bec zone and the reason I would tell someone to make the drive from Campeche even if they saw nothing else. The site’s name means “House of the Serpent Mouth” in Yucatec Maya, and the central structure of the main plaza makes the name literal: the doorway through which you enter the building is the open mouth of a fanged serpent deity, rendered in stone mosaic in obsessive, extraordinary detail. The creature’s eyes are above the doorway. Its teeth frame the entry. Its tongue extends as a ramp into the building’s interior.

I arrived at Chicanna early on my second day and had the site entirely to myself for forty minutes before a family from Campeche arrived. In those forty minutes I walked into the serpent’s mouth and out again four times, trying to understand what the experience was designed to feel like from inside the logic of Classic Maya religion rather than from inside the logic of a French person in the twenty-first century who has read some secondary literature. I didn’t get there. But the structure is genuinely one of the most astonishing things I have seen in Mexico, and I have been in Mexico long enough to have seen a lot.

The jungle around Chicanna is continuous and loud in the way that Yucatán jungle is loud — birds constantly, insects underneath them, something moving in the canopy periodically that I never identified. The sound is not background. It is a presence.

Getting There and Logistics

The town of Xpujil is the base for the Río Bec sites. It is 374 kilometers from Campeche City, about three and a half hours by car on Highway 186, which is the main road from Campeche toward Chetumal. There are a few small hotels in Xpujil and the sites are distributed within about thirty kilometers of the town.

A car is essentially necessary — the sites are spread out and public transport to most of them does not exist in useful form. The sites have small entrance fees and rangers on duty, but do not expect extensive infrastructure: no audio guides, no food, limited water available. Bring water, a hat, and sunscreen; even in the dry season the humidity is significant.

Hormiguero is the other Río Bec site worth seeking out: the best-preserved of the decorative towers, further from Xpujil than Chicanna and correspondingly less visited, in a stretch of jungle that feels genuinely remote. I went there at three in the afternoon and met nobody at all, which in my experience of Maya archaeology is rare enough to be worth noting.