Edzná

Edzná is the largest Maya city open to visitors near Campeche city, set in a wide, flat valley about 55 km inland from the capital. The valley floods in the rainy season, and the people who lived here dealt with it by building a network of canals and reservoirs that drained the fields, stored rainwater through the dry months and gave them water for farming and for the lime mortar of their buildings. Its name probably comes from Itzná, "house of the Itzá", a lineage that ruled the city in its last centuries; the inscriptions use other signs for the place, one of them a rattlesnake's rattle.

The first traces of settlement date from around 400 BC. By the start of the Common Era a small farming community had a central government, and between about 400 and 1000 Edzná was a powerful regional capital of the western peninsula. At its height it covered some 25 square kilometres, had around 25,000 inhabitants and kept ties with Calakmul and Piedras Negras. Thirty-three stelae are known, most showing rulers in rich dress; ten rulers' names have been read, one of them a woman's. The city lost power slowly and was abandoned around 1450. Local farmers knew the ruins long before they were reported to the government in 1906, and organised excavation began in 1958.

The core of the visit is the Great Acropolis, a huge platform raised over older sacred buildings. On its east side stands the Building of the Five Storeys, a stepped pyramid with vaulted rooms on each level and a temple with a roof comb on top, about 36 metres above the plaza below; it mixes Petén-style architecture with later additions up to the Postclassic. Across the main plaza is the long Nohochná, the Big House, with four galleries on top, and nearby are a ballcourt, the Small Acropolis, one of the oldest parts of the site, and the Temple of the Masks, with two stucco faces of the sun god.