Zona Arqueológica Balcón de Montezuma

Balcón de Montezuma is a pre-Hispanic village built along the long, narrow crest of a mountain at 1,026 metres, in oak forest southwest of Ciudad Victoria. It is one of the few sites in the Sierra Madre Oriental that have been studied and opened to the public, and the best example of what archaeologists call the Pueblito Complex or Serrana Region: the most northeasterly extension in Mexico of a culture with stone architecture, fine pottery, farming and ceremonial life, on the fringe where Mesoamerica gave way to the hunter-gatherer north. It shares traits with the Huastecs to the south and with peoples of the southeastern United States, visible in its pottery and the pipes found here, but it developed on its own. It was occupied roughly between AD 400 and 1200.

Its builders used every metre of the ridge, which drops into deep gorges to the north and south. They raised about a hundred round platforms of varying height to suit the ground, with cores of earth and stone faced with limestone blocks, and on top built houses and temples of brushwood daubed with mud and roofed with palm. The platforms stand close together, separated only by narrow paths, and are grouped around two plazas aligned east to west, where community business was settled and rites were held at low altars about a metre across. Several have fan-shaped stairways, with wider steps at the bottom than at the top; those in Plaza 1 show it best. At the entrance on the west slope, the Great Stairway doubled as a quarry: as the builders cut blocks for the platforms they shaped the steps that are still used today. Excavations found about 200 burials.

There are hundreds of similar sites on the summits of the Sierra Madre Oriental and the Sierra de Tamaulipas. This one lies inside the Altas Cumbres protected area, beside the old Camino Real to Tula, and walking in along the ridge, with natural lookouts over both sides of the range, is part of the visit.