Tikal

Seventy metre temples standing out of the rainforest

Tikal lies in the rainforest of the Petén in northern Guatemala, the ruin of a city its builders probably called Yax Mutal and one of the great powers of the Classic Maya world. Its temple pyramids still push their roof-combs above the canopy, and in the first Star Wars film, in 1977, George Lucas used them for the jungle moon Yavin 4.

The city's rulers recorded their own history in stone, and one episode reads like a thriller. On 14 January 378 the fourteenth king, Chak Tok Ich'aak, was killed, and on the same day a stranger called Siyaj K'ak', Fire Is Born, arrived from the west. Stela 31 names him Lord of the West. He seems to have been a general serving a figure written with a spearthrower and an owl, a glyph well known from the great metropolis of Teotihuacan in the distant Valley of Mexico, and Spearthrower Owl may have been Teotihuacan's ruler. Within a year Spearthrower Owl's son, Yax Nuun Ahiin I, was enthroned at Tikal as a boy, on 13 September 379, and reigned for 47 years. A faction at Tikal seems to have helped; a group of Teotihuacanos was living near the Lost World complex.

Tikal went on to fight a long war with its rival Calakmul, 100 km to the northwest, and endured more than a century without a dated monument. Then in 682 Jasaw Chan K'awiil I set one up again, and in 695 he captured a Calakmul noble and sent the enemy state into a decline it never escaped. He and his heir built much of what stands today. The city ran on until it was abandoned around AD 900.

The Petén governor Ambrosio Tut and the commissioner Modesto Méndez reached it in 1848, the first modern explorers. Guatemala made it a national park in 1955, and in 1979 UNESCO listed it for both its culture and its nature.

It turned out to be bigger than anyone had guessed. In 2018 a LiDAR survey, laser pulses fired from aircraft through the canopy over 2,100 square kilometres of northern Petén, revealed more than 60,000 hidden Maya structures, houses, palaces, raised highways and defences, many of them around already-known cities such as Tikal. The archaeologist Thomas Garrison suggested the region's population might have been three or four times greater than once thought, and Stephen Houston of Brown University called it one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaeology. Tikal is now one of Guatemala's most significant tourist attractions.