Historical landmark
Chichén Itzá
Nine-tiered step pyramid whose equinox sunlight casts a shadow serpent down its staircase.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to El Castillo, the Kukulkan pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico, turns on a 2017 conference where archaeologists challenged one of the site's best-loved claims: that Maya priests deliberately engineered the equinox shadow serpent that still draws crowds to this plaza twice a year. It traces the claim back to twentieth-century writers and a hundred-site study of how the Maya actually tracked the calendar, and brings in archaeologist Adriana Velazquez Morlet. Best watched from the Grand Plaza in late afternoon.
This audio guide was created using AI.