Soledad de Maciel (La Chole)

La Soledad de Maciel, a village of about 400 people in the municipality of Petatlán known locally as La Chole, sits on the remains of Xihuacan, the main ceremonial centre of Guerrero's coastal plain. The Nahuatl name means "place of the owners of turquoise", and by extension "the owners of time", the people who kept the calendar. The site was lived in for some three thousand years, from the Preclassic to the Early Postclassic, and peaked in the Epiclassic (650-950 AD), when it was the largest town between Acapulco and Zacatula. Around 1350 a great flood swamped the complex and its people drifted to higher ground.

The headline is the ball court, 160 by 29 metres; part of it is still unexcavated, so it may be the largest in Mesoamerica. It was sunk below the level of the plazas to stand for the underworld the Sun crossed at night, and digs turned up offerings, human bones and ceramic figures, many of them jaguars. One of its blocks carries the glyph that spells the city's name. Mound B, about 14 metres high with nine sloping tiers, had temples on top and was used for water rites, the New Fire ceremony and sky-watching; the whole ceremonial centre was laid out by Venus, the Sun and the North Star. The pyramids are built of river stone and adobe, unusual in Mexico, and man-made channels fed by the San Jeronimito river still run between them. Cerro de los Brujos, the oldest part, has rock carvings.

The site museum, built between 2007 and 2010, shows the round stone with the Xihuacan glyph found beside the ball court, plus figurines, vessels, shellwork, copper axes and necklaces, with an ethnobotanical garden next door. The bas-relief stela known as the King of La Chole, found in 1944, still stands by the village church. In 2021 the family of a Petatlán schoolteacher handed INAH 969 pieces he had gathered in the 1950s and 60s, mostly from villages around Xihuacan.