Chichen Itza: the pyramid, the serpent of shadow, the city and what lies under El Castillo

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Chichen Itza is a Maya city in the north of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula that flourished between about AD 600 and 1200 and reached its height around 900–1100, when it was the largest city of the Maya world and its architecture mixed Maya tradition with the styles of central Mexico. Its centrepiece, the Temple of Kukulcán, called El Castillo, is a stepped pyramid 98 feet (30 m) high whose four stairways of 91 steps plus the top platform add up to 365, and down whose north stair the setting sun of the equinox throws a serpent of shadow. Inside it are two earlier pyramids, and beneath it, found by geophysics in 2015, a water-filled cenote. Below: the builders and dates, the pyramid and its calendar, what is inside and under it, the Temple of the Warriors, the largest ball court in the Americas, the observatory, the Sacred Cenote and its offerings, the fall of the city, and a separate section for the theories. Chichen Itza is in the Ancient temples of the world collection.

Who built it and when

The Maya. The name means "at the mouth of the well of the Itza", the Itza being the Maya group that ruled it in its late phase. The city began around AD 600 in the Puuc style of the northern Maya, with carved stone mosaics and long-nosed rain-god masks, as at Uxmal; the "Old Chichen" south of the main plaza belongs to this phase. From about 900 a new style appeared alongside it: feathered serpents, colonnaded halls, reclining chacmool figures and warrior columns that closely resemble Tula, the Toltec capital 800 miles away in central Mexico. Whether Toltecs conquered Chichen, or Maya lords adopted a fashionable international style, or the two cities developed together, is the oldest argument in Maya archaeology; the current view leans toward exchange rather than conquest, with Chichen ruled by a council of Maya lineages rather than a single king, which is why it has no royal portrait stelae like Tikal or Palenque. Building stopped around 1200. Chichen Itza overview.

El Castillo: a pyramid as a calendar

The Temple of Kukulcán is nine stepped terraces on a square base 181 feet (55 m) on each side, with a stairway of 91 steps on each face and a temple on top: 91 times 4 is 364, plus the platform makes 365, the days of the solar year. The nine terraces divided by the stairways make 18 sections a side, the months of the Maya solar calendar; the 52 panels on each face are the years of the calendar round. On the afternoon of the spring and autumn equinoxes the stepped northwest corner casts a zigzag of seven triangles of light down the north balustrade that ends at the carved serpent's head at the bottom: the feathered serpent Kukulcán descending, a spectacle that draws tens of thousands and was almost certainly intended, since the pyramid is aligned about 17 degrees east of north to produce it. Kukulcán is the Maya name of the central Mexican Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, and the pyramid is his temple. Climbing has been forbidden since 2006.

What is inside and beneath it

In the 1930s Mexican archaeologists tunnelled into El Castillo and found an earlier, smaller pyramid inside it, complete with its own stair and a temple containing a chacmool and a red jaguar throne inlaid with jade, its eyes and spots of jade, its fangs of shell, left where the Maya had buried it under the later building. In 2016 an electrical-resistivity survey found a third, still earlier pyramid inside the second, about 33 feet (10 m) high, probably from the 6th to 8th centuries. In 2015 the same team detected a cenote, a water-filled sinkhole in the limestone, about 65 feet (20 m) below the pyramid's centre; the Maya may have built over it deliberately, since cenotes were entrances to the underworld and the source of water in a land without rivers. The inner pyramid was open to visitors until 2006.

The Temple of the Warriors, the Great Ball Court and the observatory

The Temple of the Warriors, east of the plaza, is a stepped platform fronted by the Group of a Thousand Columns, carved with warriors, and topped by a chacmool between two feathered-serpent columns; it is the building most like Tula. The Great Ball Court, the largest in Mesoamerica at 545 by 225 feet (166 by 68 m), has walls 27 feet high with stone rings set 20 feet up, and reliefs of players, one of them decapitated with serpents of blood springing from his neck; a whisper at one end is heard at the other. The Caracol, "the snail", is a round tower on a platform with a spiral stair inside and windows aligned to the extremes of Venus, the planet the Maya tracked most closely; it is the best candidate for an observatory in the Maya world. The Tzompantli, a platform carved with rows of skulls, held the actual skull rack of sacrificed enemies.

The Sacred Cenote

A natural well 200 feet (60 m) across and 90 feet down to the water, joined to the plaza by a causeway, was the city's reason for being and its holiest place: pilgrims came from across the Maya world to throw offerings into it, and in drought people were thrown in as well. Edward Thompson, the American consul, dredged it between 1904 and 1910 and sent the finds to Harvard: gold and copper discs and bells from as far as Panama, jade, obsidian, rubber balls, textiles, and the bones of some 200 people, most of them children and young men, not the virgins of the legend. Mexican divers in the 1960s recovered thousands more objects. The sacrifices were for Chaac, the rain god, and the cenote is the "well" in the city's name.

Why it fell

Chichen Itza declined after about 1200, probably in the same wave of drought that ended the southern Maya cities two centuries earlier and that lake sediments record across Yucatán. Its rival Mayapán, a smaller walled city to the west, took over the peninsula until it too fell in the 1440s; Chichen remained a pilgrimage site, and the Spanish found the Itza's descendants still venerating the cenote in the 1530s. The conquistador Francisco de Montejo briefly tried to make the ruins his capital in 1532 and was driven out. The site was bought by Thompson in 1894 for 75 dollars, became Mexican state property in 2010, and was named one of the New Seven Wonders in 2007.

Versions and theories

Everything below is a version, not a fact. These are the claims that appear in search next to Chichen Itza, each with who made it and what the evidence says.

The Toltecs conquered Chichen Itza

Version. The classic account, from colonial Maya chronicles about a foreign leader named Kukulcán and from the resemblance to Tula. Reply. Still possible, but dating now shows the "Toltec" buildings at Chichen are as old as or older than those at Tula, so influence may have run the other way or both cities may have shared a style; there is no destruction layer marking a conquest.

Virgins were thrown into the cenote

Version. The 16th-century story repeated by Thompson. Reply. The bones are mostly of children aged 3 to 11 and of adult men, with few young women; sacrifice happened, but not the way the legend says.

The equinox serpent is a modern coincidence

Version. Sceptics have argued the shadow effect was noticed only in the 20th century. Reply. The effect was first described in print in 1928, but the pyramid's alignment, its serpent-head balustrades and the 365-step count make it very unlikely to be accidental; the Maya recorded the equinoxes and solstices in their codices.

Chichen Itza encodes the galaxy, or was built by Atlanteans or aliens

Version. The familiar claims. Reply. The city has three building phases in a known Maya sequence, quarries, tools, middens and inscriptions, and an earlier pyramid inside the later one built by the same people.

The whisper and the chirp are designed acoustics

Version. A hand clap at the foot of El Castillo's stair returns an echo like the call of the quetzal bird, and the ball court carries a whisper end to end; both are said to be intentional. Reply. Acoustic studies confirm the effects and show they arise from the step geometry and the parallel walls; whether the builders intended them cannot be proven, though the quetzal was Kukulcán's bird.

What is in the archive

El Castillo and the Temple of the Warriors are in the Ancient temples of the world collection with the other Maya cities, Tikal, Palenque, Uxmal, Calakmul and Copán, and with Teotihuacan, the central Mexican city whose feathered serpent came south. For the comparison with Egypt see Mayan vs Egyptian pyramids.

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