Rain gods and flooded caverns

We didn’t choose the Maya ruins at Uxmal because they were famous—we chose them because they weren’t.

Chichén Itzá gets all the attention, but everyone we trusted had warned us that unless you enjoy shouting vendors, sunburned crowds, and the unmistakable scent of exhaust fumes wafting across the sacred ground, it's better to skip it. On the other hand, Uxmal came with quieter endorsements—smaller, less crowded, more intact, more atmospheric. Less of a theme park and more of a time machine. We were sold.

We left Mérida early to beat the heat¹ and met our escort, Sergio, up the street. We were joined by a family of three from New York who proved to be super fun, and off we went to the ruins. And it was exactly what we’d hoped—no buses, no tour group following a waving stick with an orange flag, no chattering vendors. Just sun, stone, and the distant sound of birds. At the entrance, Sergio passed us off to a professional site guide—someone who actually knew what they were talking about—while he ducked into the shade and left us to the ruins.

If Uxmal is known for anything, it's geometry. Every structure, every platform, and every ceremonial space is about height, alignment, and performance. The first thing you see as you crest a small hill is the Pyramid of the Magician—El Adivino—rising abruptly from the plaza in a form unlike anything else in the Maya world. It's the tallest structure at Uxmal, topping out at 115 feet, but what sets it apart is its unusual oval base—a horizontal ellipse that's rare, possibly unique, among Mesoamerican pyramids. Most pyramids are sharply rectangular, built for symmetry and scale. This one feels more sculptural as if it were shaped rather than constructed. Its asymmetry plays tricks on the eye. From some angles, it feels almost in motion.

It was built in five phases between roughly 570 and 950 CE. What looks like a single imposing pyramid is five stacked temples, each engulfing the last in a layered campaign of architectural one-upmanship. The earliest, Temple I,² sat low to the ground and was once adorned with serpent-mouth façades—open maws from which human or deity heads emerged in high-relief grotesques. You’d barely know it now, they’ve been nearly erased by time. Only bits of columns and a few buried corners peek out from under the later structures. Temple II came next, then Temple III on its western side, now entirely hidden. Temple IV, with its dramatic “monster-mouth” doorway—Puuc style with Chenes flair³— and Temple V, at the very top, completed the whole assemblage like a ceremonial crown.

The west stairway—impossibly steep at 60 degrees—is lined with a repeated series of Chaac masks, their long noses curving upward like serpents. Chaac, the long-nosed god of rain and storms, was carved into the façade like a mantra—rows of him, staring down with the stone-faced urgency of someone who knows what’s at stake. Because rain didn’t just matter to the Maya. It was the main event. Cities lived or died by it. Uxmal had no cenote, no rivers, no natural wells. Only rain. So they built chultunes—underground cisterns, plastered smooth and tucked beneath courtyards and plazas—each one a desperate engineering feat designed to catch and hold the sky. Some could store more than 9,000 gallons of water. Some still do. And they built gods into the walls to make sure the water came.⁴

The site unfolds behind El Adivino into a series of interlocking courtyards and platforms that feel both monumental and intimate. The House of the Birds sits nearby, one of the oldest buildings at Uxmal, dating to around 570 CE. Its frieze is carved full of repeating stylized parrots, quetzals, and pelicans. You can stand in the courtyard and clap your hands—and the echo will come back as a bird call. No kidding. It totally works.

From the House of the Birds, we headed into the Nunnery Quadrangle,⁵ where four palaces surround a central plaza. The South Building, at the lowest point, forms the formal entry. Its towering, corbeled arch still bears faint red handprints on the inside —ghostly signatures pressed centuries ago as if to say, "I was here." Whether they belonged to builders, priests, or initiates isn't known. What's clear is that they were meant to mark a threshold, not just physically but spiritually. The hand is the oldest signature we have. From that vantage point, you look straight across the courtyard to the North Building, the highest of the four, believed to be a council house, or popol-nah.

The buildings here aren’t just pretty, they’re mathematically aligned. The East and West structures sit on platforms that match the height of the South Building’s frieze. The North Building rises again, its base level with the roofs of the others. It’s all tiered, symmetrical, performative. You could spend a happy hour or two just watching the light shift across the relief carvings, all woven into lattice motifs, corn cribs, Venus symbols, and jaguar thrones. One frieze depicts double-headed serpents stacked like scaffolding, which some believe symbolizes dry maize storage. It wasn’t just symbolic. It was a survival strategy, spelled out in serpent heads and stacked stone.

From the Nunnery Quadrangle, you can see the rising platforms in the distance, crowned by the massive Palace of the Governor. But first, a broad staircase spills down into a vast ceremonial plaza that leads toward the ballcourt—a long, walled alley where Maya elites staged ritual games that were equal parts ceremony, athleticism, and political theater. No one’s entirely sure of the rules,⁶ but the court position at the intersection of civic and sacred space makes one thing clear—this wasn’t an opportunity for halftime entertainment or product placement. It was a state-sponsored spectacle with cosmic implications.

The Palace of the Governor is a real showstopper of the site today. Everything about it is designed to dominate. It sits atop a four-tiered platform that rises more than 50 feet above the rest of the site. The palace itself stretches the length of a football field, and instead of facing north like the rest of the city, it is aligned in a southeasterly direction toward the morning star. Around 900 CE, you would have seen Venus rise at its southernmost point through its central doorway. That's not just astronomy. That's power. The ruler of Uxmal—Lord Chac,⁷ according to stelae from this period—could have stood in that doorway, watching the sky, framed by architecture and prophecy.

The palace façade is covered in more than 200 mosaic Chaac masks. Each is subtly different, and many include symbols for Venus carved into the eyelids. The message was clear—Lord Chac controlled not just people but the weather, agriculture, and the heavens. In front of the palace sits a two-headed jaguar throne, empty now but once a comfy seat for a king pretending to be a god.

Perched at the edge of the same massive platform as the Governor’s Palace is a compact, low-slung building called the House of the Turtles. It’s easy to miss at first, but then you see the turtles carved into a circle beneath the roofline like a slow-motion parade. Each one has a different pattern carved on its shell. The turtle is no minor character in Maya cosmology. It symbolized water, fertility, and the earth itself, floating in a primordial sea. It's also said that the Maize God died after being defeated in the underworld but was reborn from a cracked turtle shell, which symbolizes the earth cracking open to allow new life to sprout.⁸

Nearly hidden behind the Governor’s Palace is the Great Pyramid. Unlike El Adivino, which dazzles with polish and precision, the Great Pyramid looks only half-remembered by time. It is even more massive and not as restored. Its summit temple sits high above a sunken courtyard, and much of its ornamentation is lost. What remains is telling—swirling wind volutes, faint Chaac masks, round, flower-like stones symbolizing itz, sacred substances like sap, dew, candle wax, and magic itself. Archaeologists think this was a conjuring house—an Itzam Nah—where ritual acts were performed to invite rain, storms, or visions. In any other city, this would be the centerpiece. Here, it’s just one more holy punctuation mark in a landscape full of them.

By the time we reached the Great Pyramid, the sun was directly overhead, and the sweat had reached new and unexpected locations on our bodies. So it was time to leave. Our intrepid little group piled back into Sergio's van and headed for Muna, where we stopped for lunch at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it taquería called El Regalo de Dios. Clearly a family endeavor, it was terrific. Pork, lime, pico, and hot, fresh tortillas—nothing fancy but divine and worth every second of the heat it took to get there.

Fed and rested, we continued onward. We’d spent the morning climbing platforms, contemplating Maya gods, and pondering celestial alignments. The most reasonable next step, obvs, was to hurl ourselves into a flooded cave or two.

Honestly, I had not been looking forward to the cenotes. I can’t swim.⁹ But we were in the Yucatán, and cenotes are part of the deal. The Maya believed them to be entrances to Xibalba, the underworld. Some were sacred wells, some were used for offerings,¹⁰ and some—like the ones we visited—were just beautiful, eerie holes in the earth where water collects and time slows down.

Cenotes exist here because the entire Yucatán Peninsula is made of porous, soluble limestone. About 66 million years ago—just yesterday in geological time—a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the planet, hollowing out what’s now the Gulf of Mexico and creating the Chicxulub crater.¹¹ That titanic collision fractured the limestone bedrock for miles in every direction. It also kicked up countless stone projectiles that punched even more holes into the earth. Over time, rainwater seeped in, carved out underground caverns, and the ceilings collapsed, leaving perfect sinkholes scattered across the peninsula. Thousands of them.

The Maya saw portals to the underworld. Geologists saw impact trauma and slow erosion. They’re both right.¹²

Our first stop was Yaal-Utzil, “Good Son.” It was open to the sky, ringed by limestone walls that rose more than 60 feet from the water's surface. Two diving platforms—one at the top and another about halfway down—jutted out over water so clear it looked artificial. Tree roots dipped in like fingers. Birds chirped from invisible perches. The kids in our group took turns hurling themselves from the high platform. Rick, always sensible, leaped in from the bottom of the stairs, a dramatic dive of roughly one foot. Meanwhile, I struggled with my too-big life jacket bunching up around my ears while bob-bob-bobbing along, my dignity always floating just out of reach.

But the water was perfect—cool, clean, gentle. I clung to the side like a well-behaved float,¹³ half proud of myself, half convinced something unpleasant and hungry was eyeing me from below. Sergio mentioned in passing that jaguar bones had recently been found here. Of course they had. You don’t get that kind of blue without a little blood in the water.

We toweled off, hydrated, and I congratulated myself for surviving my first sacred swimming hole with only minor wardrobe malfunctions. It had all gone surprisingly well, and spirits were high as we clambered back into the van for our next stop, Kankirixche cenote.

This one was different. More dramatic. Less forgiving. Kankirixche is a semi-open cenote, which means “a cave with a small hole in the roof.” You reach it by descending a parody of wooden stairs that are, if possible, even ricketier than the ones at Yaal Utzil. Below, the scene shifts dramatically, and you're in a large underground chamber thick with stalactites, underwater stalagmites, and a general sense of foreboding. Tree roots twist and mingle with shadows.

This time, I got in without a life preserver. Having come out of the first cenote without drowning, I was feeling a little cocky. My optimism may have been misplaced. It’s one thing to float in an open cenote under the sun. It’s another to lower yourself into a flooded cave and try not to imagine every horror movie you’ve ever seen about being in places you don’t belong.

One side of the pool has shallow areas to stand in, which is helpful if you like your terror grounded. The other side drops precipitously into a lightless abyss fed by an underground river popular with scuba divers. Because blind underwater spelunking is…fun? There are fish here, too—small, shooting flashes of silver—so if you’re brave enough to put your face in the water, a snorkel or mask is worth the trouble.

Rick paddled around happily, even suspending himself over that impossibly deep crater. I stuck to the shallow side and had a quiet, polite panic attack.

Eventually, once my survival seemed more probable, I started to enjoy myself. The water here had its own gravity. Yes, I stuck near the edge, but I could see the schools of fish dart through beams of sunlight that pierced the gloom. It was beautiful. I didn’t stay long. But I did stay long enough.

We never did go to Chichén Itzá. We didn’t need to. Uxmal gave us the sky, the past, and a thousand gods carved into stone. The cenotes gave us the underworld. And somewhere between the two, the earth opened up—and we were there to see it.