La Venta

La Venta was the most important center of the Olmec, the earliest civilization of Mesoamerica. It stands on a low island of dry ground, about 5 square kilometers, in the swamps of the Tonalá River delta, which marks the border between Tabasco and Veracruz, some 15 km from the Gulf coast. People lived around here from about 1200 BC, but the city had its heyday between roughly 900 and 400 BC, after the decline of San Lorenzo in Veracruz, and it was largely abandoned by the fourth century BC. Nobody knows what its builders called it; the name comes from a timber-trading village founded next to the ruins in the late 19th century.

With almost no local stone, the Olmec built in earth and clay. The centerpiece is the Great Pyramid of Complex C, a clay mound about 30 meters high that is one of the oldest pyramids in Mesoamerica. To the north lies Complex A, a restricted ceremonial area once fenced with basalt columns, where archaeologists found buried offerings of jade, serpentine mosaics in the shape of a jaguar mask and elaborate tombs. The site is laid out along a north–south axis, and is often described as the first planned city in ancient Mexico. The heavy basalt for the colossal heads, altars and stelae was brought from the Tuxtla mountains in Veracruz.

Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge described the ruins in 1925, and Matthew Stirling dug here in the early 1940s, uncovering four colossal heads, altars and the jaguar mosaics. From the 1950s an oil installation, an airstrip, roads and the growing town destroyed much of the site, and the poet Carlos Pellicer had dozens of monuments moved to Villahermosa, where they stand today in Parque-Museo La Venta. What remains at Villa La Venta is the protected core: the pyramid, the plazas and mounds of Complexes A and B, and a site museum with models, photographs and more than 200 objects.