Inside the Xunantunich Mayan Ruins
El Castillo, the frieze, the tomb, and the two stones that were carved somewhere else.
Xunantunich is an open-air site. There is no interior, no rooms to tour, no roof. What survives is a ridge-top core of plazas with buildings ranged around them, and one pyramid tall enough to see Guatemala from.
El Castillo
130 feet / about 40 metres. The second-tallest structure in Belize, after Caana at Caracol. It stands at the south end of Plaza A-I and you climb it by a series of stone staircases and hollow chambers — one operator counts roughly 200 steps. From the top the view runs west across the border into Guatemala.
Its upper levels were built in two phases, around 800 and around 900 CE. The later phase buried most of the earlier frieze.
"El Castillo" is a modern Spanish nickname for this one building. It is not what the Maya called it, and it does not describe the site.
The frieze
A band of moulded stucco below the upper temple. It originally wrapped all four sides of the A-6-2nd roof panel; fragments survive on the east and west. The east frieze carries a World Tree, a sun god, the moon and Venus, with Chaac — the rain god — probably at the centre.
What you photograph today is a replica. The originals are sealed underneath it. The Getty Conservation Institute did the work between 1992 and 1996, because the weather was destroying the real thing faster than it could be recorded. The replica is not a disappointment — it is why anything survives at all.
The 2016 royal tomb
The largest royal burial found in Belize in over a century: an adult male aged 20–30, with 36 ceramic vessels, a jade necklace, 14 obsidian blades, and deer or jaguar remains. Found by Jaime Awe's team in 2016, after Gann, Maler, Thompson, Satterthwaite, MacKie, Leventhal and Ashmore had all worked the site.
The temple appears to have been built around the burial rather than the burial cut into a finished building — an unusual sequence in Maya architecture.
The wall between the plazas
A-1 separates Plaza A-I from Plaza A-II. It was built — along with A-13 — only in the ninth century, which is to say at the very end. Archaeologists read the pair as the ruling family walling itself off from the rest of the city as the Classic order collapsed around it. It is a small building carrying a large argument.
The palace
The residential complex for the ruling family, on its own plaza. Euan MacKie excavated the upper building in 1959–60.
The long building
Linear, roughly 223 feet / 67 metres long, with a dozen or more chambers. Ninth century, like A-1, and part of the same closing-off of the ceremonial core.
The stones from Caracol
Carved panels from a Caracol ceremonial staircase commissioned in 642 CE. Their text — deciphered by Christophe Helmke — records the Snake-head dynasty's move from Dzibanche to Calakmul, and Panel 3 carries a death statement for Lady Batz' Ek' (died 638 CE). They were dismantled somewhere else and re-erected here.
The plazas and the wider site
| Plaza A-I | The main ceremonial plaza, El Castillo at its south end |
| Plaza A-II | North of A-1, separated from A-I in the 9th century |
| Plaza A-III | The palace plaza, around Structure A-11 |
| Groups B, C and D | Outlying settlement groups beyond the core |
| The Aguada | The reservoir — a ridge-top city has no river at hand |
| Sacbeob | Raised causeways running into Plaza A-I |
Reading the site without a guide
The structures are unlabelled. Nothing tells you that the frieze is a replica, that A-1 is a ninth-century wall, or that two of the carved panels were made in another city. The visitor centre holds a full-scale frieze replica — five minutes there before you climb changes what you see when you get up there.