Zona Arqueológica La Ferrería

Seven kilometers south of downtown Durango, on a low hill above the Tunal River, lie the remains of the most important pre-Hispanic town of the Guadiana Valley. La Ferrería was built by the Guadiana branch of the Chalchihuites culture, farmers who lived in the valleys east of the Sierra Madre Occidental between about AD 600 and 1350, growing corn, beans and squash and adding game, wild plants and river fish. INAH describes it as a religious center where the surrounding villages came together. Its heyday was the Las Joyas phase, roughly 850 to 1000; after that it slowly emptied, and by around 1350 it had been abandoned. Mesquite and aloe cover the slopes today.

Visitors can walk about 22 hectares with 19 structures, five petroglyphs and mortars cut into the bedrock. At the foot of the hill, the House of the Leaders surrounds a sunken courtyard carved out of solid rock; burials found there held a Chalchihuites tripod pot next to a vessel from Aztatlán on the Pacific coast, evidence that the highland valley traded with the coast. Up the slope, the Casa Grande is a warren of rooms, corridors, stairways and a columned portico around a courtyard with a rectangular altar. On top stands a stepped pyramid with a small sunken patio at its summit, lined up so that the sun rises over the Sierra de Registro and its corners mark the equinoxes and solstices. There is also a ballcourt with two sloping parallel walls, and among the carvings a polished boulder showing a priest with raised arms and an antler headdress.

The American anthropologist Alden Mason first reported the site in 1948, under the name Cerro Ayala. A few years later Charles Kelley dug here with University of Chicago students and removed many artifacts whose whereabouts are unknown. Some forty years of neglect and looting followed, and systematic research only resumed in the 1990s. The site museum, opened in 2000 and redesigned in 2006 and 2007, displays red-banded pottery, large burial jars, obsidian blades and finds from rescue digs elsewhere in the state, and the zone ticket covers it. The hill takes its name from the neighboring village, once called La Ferrería and now Ejido 4 de Octubre, where the ruins of an old ironworks have been turned into a park.