After chilly San Cristobal de las Casas we headed to very hot Palenque, the site of a massive ruin, which was another powerful city back in its day. Very different to the dry ruins we´d seen in Teotihuacan and Monte Alban, these ruins are set in the middle of a jungle, and in fact we had the opportunity to see some ruins that were still in the jungle, covered by hundreds of years of soil, trees and plants. Anyone who has about $40,000 to spare could potentially pay for the excavation of one buried pyramid.
Palenque was abandoned around the same time (900AD I think) as pretty much all of these cities in the region, and nobody really knows why, though the theory of environmental degradation seems to have the biggest number of supporters, and given the thousands upon thousands of trees they would have had to cut down to make the stucco sculptures lining all of the walls, it makes the most sense to us!
This particular ruin was so sophisticated. It had an aqeuduct system (still partially functioning today), toilets in the main palace, and there were even still beds in rooms left in the palace.
Temple of inscriptions
The palace
Observation tower in the palace
Ruins of pyramids in the jungle
Rooms inside the palace
Remains of a painting that would once have covered the entire wall
Remains of stucco sculptures, on the right is Pakal, one mighty ruler (who happened to have one leg shorter than the other... likely a result of incest)
Temple of the sun
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