Tikal, Guatemala: facts about the Maya superpower in the jungle, its temples, its war with Calakmul, why it fell, and how to visit

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Tikal, in the rainforest of the Petén in northern Guatemala, was the largest and most powerful city of the Classic Maya, home to perhaps 60,000 to 100,000 people between AD 250 and 900, the seat of a dynasty of 33 known kings, and the builder of the tallest structures in the Americas before the 20th century: six temple-pyramids, of which Temple I on the Great Plaza is 47 m and Temple IV, at 70 m, was the highest building in the Maya world. Its name in its own inscriptions was Mutul or Yax Mutul; "Tikal", from the Maya for "at the water hole", is 19th-century. It was taken over by a general from Teotihuacan in Mexico in 378, fought a war with Calakmul for over a century, was defeated in 562 and rose again under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I in 695, built its greatest temples in the 8th century, and was empty by about 950; the jungle took it, and it was found again in 1848. A LiDAR survey in 2018 showed the city and its region held 60,000 structures and far more people than anyone had thought. Below: the city and its buildings, the kings and the wars, the collapse, the rediscovery, the numbers and visiting, and the theories, with the city's rivals in the Ancient temples of the world collection.

The city

Tikal's centre is a set of plazas and pyramids on a low ridge between swamps, connected by raised causeways, covering about 16 square kilometres of mapped ruins with more than 3,000 structures, and the city with its suburbs and farmland spread over 120. At the heart is the Great Plaza, with Temple I, the Temple of the Great Jaguar, on its east side, 47 m high in nine stepped tiers, built about 732 as the tomb of Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, and Temple II, the Temple of the Masks, 38 m, facing it across the plaza, built by the same king for his queen; on the north the North Acropolis, a platform of temples and royal tombs rebuilt over a thousand years from 350 BC, with the burials of most of the dynasty inside, and on the south the Central Acropolis, a maze of palace courts where the kings lived. Beyond are Temple III, 55 m, the last great pyramid, of about 810, with the last carved date at Tikal; Temple IV, 70 m, built about 741 by Yik'in Chan K'awiil, from whose top the other temples rise from the canopy; Temple V, 57 m; the Temple of the Inscriptions with its hieroglyphic roof crest; the Lost World complex, a Preclassic pyramid of 30 m with an astronomical platform of the kind at Uaxactún; and the Seven Temples plaza with its triple ball court. The temples are solid rubble faced with limestone, carrying a small temple of one to three rooms under a tall roof comb, once painted red, cream and green, with wooden lintels of sapodilla carved with the kings; the stone is local, cut with stone tools and burned for the lime plaster that covered everything. Tikal.

The kings

• Yax Ehb Xook, about AD 90. The founder of the dynasty, whose successors counted from him; the city had been occupied since about 800 BC and had pyramids by 300 BC.
• Chak Tok Ich'aak I, died 378. "Great Jaguar Paw", the 14th king, who died, the inscriptions say, on the day the general Sihyaj K'ahk', "Fire Is Born", arrived from the west, from Teotihuacan, the great city near modern Mexico City 1,000 km away; a year later a boy, Yax Nuun Ahiin I, son of a Teotihuacan ruler called Spearthrower Owl, was installed as king. Teotihuacan warriors, pottery and the talud-tablero style of building appear at Tikal, and the city became the dominant power in the lowlands for two centuries.
• Wak Chan K'awiil, died 562. Under him Tikal was defeated by Caracol, an ally of Calakmul, the "Snake kingdom" 100 km north in Mexico, and entered a "hiatus" of 130 years with no monuments; the rival Snake kings encircled it with allied cities.
• Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, 682–734. Defeated Calakmul in 695, captured its king's palanquin and god effigy, and celebrated with the rebuilding of the Great Plaza and Temple I, where he was buried under jade, shells, pearls and 37 bones carved with his victories; his tomb, Burial 116, was found in 1962.
• Yik'in Chan K'awiil, 734–about 766. His son, who defeated Calakmul's allies El Perú and Naranjo, built Temple IV and probably lies beneath it, and made Tikal the strongest city of the 8th century.
• Jasaw Chan K'awiil II, 869. The last king to erect a monument, Stela 11, in a city already shrinking.

The collapse

In the 9th century the cities of the southern lowlands stopped building and carving, one by one, and were abandoned: Tikal's last monument is of 869, its population fell from tens of thousands to a few thousand squatters living in the palaces and burning the lintels, and by 950 it was empty. The causes are the subject of a century of argument and are now thought to be several at once: a series of droughts recorded in lake sediments and cave stalagmites between 800 and 1000, in a region without rivers that depended on reservoirs Tikal had built to hold rain for its dry season, which failed when rain did not come; deforestation for farming, firewood and lime-burning, which the pollen shows had cleared most of the land around the city and would have lowered rainfall further; the endless wars of the 8th century that turned kingdoms into armed camps; and a population beyond what the land could carry. The northern Maya at Chichén Itzá flourished as the south emptied, and the Maya people did not vanish, six million of them living in Guatemala and Mexico today, but the cities of the Petén were never reoccupied, and the forest grew over them.

Rediscovery and excavation

The Spanish who conquered the Petén in 1697 passed near Tikal and did not record it; the ruins were known to the Maya of the forest and were visited in 1848 by the governor of the Petén, Modesto Méndez, and the artist Eusebio Lara, whose report was published in Berlin. The Swiss Gustav Bernoulli took the carved lintels of Temples I and IV to Basel in 1877, where they remain; Alfred Maudslay photographed the city in 1881 and Teobert Maler in 1895 and 1904; the Carnegie Institution mapped it in the 1920s, and from 1956 to 1970 the University of Pennsylvania's Tikal Project, the largest Maya excavation ever, under Edwin Shook and William Coe, cleared and restored the centre, dug the North Acropolis to bedrock and found the royal tombs, while Guatemala's own projects restored Temples I, IV and V after 1979. The airstrip built in 1951 opened it to visitors; the national park was created in 1955, and UNESCO listed Tikal in 1979 as both a cultural and a natural site, one of the first. In 2018 the PACUNAM LiDAR survey, an aircraft laser scan through the canopy of 2,100 square kilometres of the Petén, revealed 60,000 previously unknown structures, houses, terraces, causeways, fortifications and a pyramid inside Tikal's centre that had been taken for a hill, and led to a revision of the lowland Maya population to perhaps 10 million.

The numbers and visiting

• Size. 16 square kilometres of central ruins with 3,000 structures; the site core about 400 by 400 m; the national park 576 square kilometres.
• Temples. Temple IV 70 m, the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Americas after the pyramids of Teotihuacan and Cholula by volume but not height; Temple V 57 m; Temple III 55 m; Temple I 47 m; Temple II 38 m.
• Monuments. About 200 carved stelae and altars; the earliest dated Stela 29 of AD 292, the last Stela 11 of 869.
• People. 60,000 to 100,000 in the city at its height around 750; 33 kings over about 800 years.
• Visiting. Tikal is an hour's drive from Flores, itself a flight from Guatemala City or a long road from Belize; the park opens at 6 am, with sunrise tours from 4 am that climb Temple IV to hear the howler monkeys and see the temples emerge from the mist, which is the reason people come; two nights at the park lodges give a dawn and a dusk. The walk round the main groups is 10 km; Temples II and IV and the Lost World pyramid can be climbed on wooden stairs, Temple I cannot. Howler and spider monkeys, coatis, toucans and ocellated turkeys are guaranteed, jaguars are not. The rainy season is June to November; the museum at the entrance keeps the finds from Burial 116.

Versions and theories

• Did Teotihuacan conquer Tikal? The inscriptions say Fire Is Born "arrived" and the old king "entered the water" the same day; the new king's father was a Teotihuacan lord. Most epigraphers read this as a conquest and the founding of a new line; a minority see an alliance and marriage. Teotihuacan's own role, 1,000 km away, and whether its rulers directed it, is unknown; see Teotihuacan.
• Why is Temple I 47 m and Temple IV 70 m? Height was a claim: each king built above his father, and the 8th-century temples are the biggest because Tikal had just won its war. Temple IV was probably never surpassed because the city began to fail within fifty years.
• Was the collapse drought? Drought is the best-documented cause and the one most argued over; sceptics point out the northern cities on drier land survived. The current view combines drought, war and land exhaustion.
• Star Wars. Temple IV's view over Temples I, II and III served as the rebel base on Yavin 4 in "Star Wars" (1977), filmed from the top; the "Ancient Aliens" claim that the temples are launch pads has no support beyond the film.
• The LiDAR "megalopolis". The 2018 survey was reported as a lost city the size of a modern metropolis; what it showed was a densely farmed landscape of towns, terraces and roads around known cities, and a population much larger than the old estimates, not a single continuous city.
• Human sacrifice. Tikal's kings sacrificed captured lords, and the reliefs and tombs show it; the scale was far below that of the Aztecs, and the stories of mass sacrifice at Tikal are borrowed from Mexico.

The city's southern neighbour is in the collection at Copán, and the difference between the Maya and Egyptian pyramids in Mayan vs Egyptian pyramids.

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