Palenque town itself is a rather drab place, but the ruins, deep in jungle, are as spec­tac­u­lar as you might expect. It’s some­thing of a met­ro­polis, with sev­eral enorm­ous pyr­am­ids cited in lush green sur­round­ings. Other build­ings that were gen­er­ally hab­it­a­tions were tucked away within the forest itself.

Explor­ing all this you do have a sense of being on an Indi­ana Jones set. Vines swinging down, trees erupt­ing through ancient stair­ways, water­falls, pools and dark, small houses to explore. Hav­ing said that, at no point did a giant boulder swing our way, nor did stones sud­denly move in order to release a flurry of arrows or crush us under a massive slab of stone.

What I will say, quite def­in­itely, is that the May­ans had a real sense of civic archi­tec­ture. They knew how to make a place look good. Interior design is harder to assess, as most is dam­aged — but the rooms gen­er­ally felt small and dark. They’d not be pop­u­lar with the Scand­inavian school of design, for sure.

For the moment this is just an intro­duct­ory post to show where we’ve been. I’ll try and write more detail in at some point soon.

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