El Mirador
Ancient City, Deep in the Jungle
We had to get up less early on Saturday to see El Mirador than we had on Friday to go to Tikal even though it was much farther. We needed to get to the heliport in Flores, Guatemala by 8:00. Humberto, our host, drove us himself to the neighboring town, which is about 20 kilometers to the west. This was more expensive than riding the colectivo, but also more reliable, time wise.
There are two options for visiting El Mirador. You can hike in, which takes about five days in total, or you can arrange a helicopter tour. A few people hike in on their own, but most hire a guide. The guided hike costs about $400 per person. The helicopter was expensive – $550 each – but it saved us four days and an exhausting hike through the jungle. It really was the only way we were going to make it to this location with a well advanced pregnant lady along for the ride.
When Stephanie and I went to Calakmul a couple of years earlier, we could see El Mirador off in the distance with the help of our guide. I read some about the place. It seemed so remote; so distant; so exotic. I decided that someday I wanted to see it. At the time, just going to Guatemala seemed like a dicey venture. My subsequent travels have helped me realize that with a little research, most places are more accessible than you think they are. Guatemala turned out to be a friendly, hospitable place where we never felt any danger, unless it was from the sporting highway experiences common to Latin American countries.
El Mirador is a city from the Mayan pre-classic period. It was built several hundred years before any of the other major cities from that culture. To my knowledge, it is the largest Mayan city from this earlier period. That is its unique characteristic. Due to its remote location, it does not get near the tourist traffic other Mayan sites experience. We did not see any other tourists while we were there. The cost probably prevents most casual tourists from reaching the place.
El Mirador’s remote location also seems to have kept most archaeologists away. There has definitely been some work done exploring El Mirador, but nothing like what has been done at many other locations. Most of the structures remain covered over by jungle debris and centuries of growth. We climbed the largest pyramid there and ate our lunch looking out over the jungle. We circled this main temple as we approached in the helicopter, but the top is about all you can see of it. There is an archaeologist campsite near the clearing the helicopter lands in. It is set up with solar power to run a wifi system and some basic necessities. There are tents for cleaning and studying artifacts. But no one was in them when we visited.
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While we enjoyed seeing the ruins at El Mirador, and were amazed by the magnitude of the city and its buildings, especially considering its early date, my main take away from the site was its remoteness. It was hot and humid, as you would expect in the Guatemalan jungle. The weight of the air helped me feel the expanse of the jungle I was in. You have no phone service. You hear only jungle noises. From our lunch point atop the pyramid, there were just misty, light green treetops as far as the eye could see. Here and there a small rise or ridge line broke the flatness. There were no mountains, no farms, no clearings, no significant variations in types or sizes of the trees – just a vast sea of Mayan Biosphere Preserve.
The jungle we walked through was different from that at Tikal. The underbrush was less dense. If anything, there were more howler monkeys. It seemed like they were everywhere. We did not see some amazing diversity of wildlife. But then, we were only there a few hours. There were quite a few turkeys and coatimundi. Fog delayed our 8:00 takeoff, and our guide insisted we leave about an hour early to avoid the possibility of being trapped by an afternoon storm. When we finally took off, we still had to skim over the treetops only 200-300 feet AGL to stay below a cloud layer. About halfway to the site, we squeezed between a low ridge line and the overhanging clouds. We flew through a light rain in the same area on the way home, so the caution was probably warranted. All in all, we spent about five hours on site.
As one might expect, there were not as many polished stairways up the pyramids at El Mirador. The footing sometimes was a little trickier. We all made it up the structures we chose to attempt. Even Audrey waddled up with us. We snaked around trees and up displaced stones and steps, adding to the rustic character of the visit. Since the weather was threatening our time on site a bit, our guides used a Mule ATV to haul us over the longer distances between the largest temple sites. He tried to be funny by telling us we would have to ride a mule, thinking we would be shocked or somehow averse to the idea. We, of course, have all ridden mules and so were not really phased by this. I was mildly disappointed when I learned it was just a mechanical mule. There were some slick, muddy spots, and I’m sure Audrey especially appreciated not having to hike the couple of miles each way between the more distant sites.
Besides the largest pyramids, there were some other interesting sculptures and a few unearthed facades. Some of these had glyphs that predated those at the other sites so much that they weren’t completely readable even to experts. The Mayans were unique in the pre-contact Americas in that they had a written language. Until the mid twentieth century, the glyphs were a mystery. Discoveries made in the 1940s allowed anthropologists to interpret the writings from the Mayan classical period. There were apparently enough differences that those inscribed 800 years earlier were still not intelligible.
Most of the visible sculpture work had been buried by subsequent layers of building. Most Mayan artwork on the surfaces of buildings was made from molding plaster and so did not survive the weather very well. In places where the outer layer has been destroyed by weather or some other factor anyhow, sometimes lower levels are more accessible and make more sense to restore or study. These older layers of structures were protected by the newer layers built over them long enough that at least some of them remain intact in better condition than newer examples. These unearthed plaster features are still fragile, of course, often more fragile now that they are exposed. As such, great care has been taken to keep weather off of them. In many cases, several helicopters at a time were used to position metal rain shields over the top of building sized artifacts and ruins.
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Most of these Mayan sites contain built up roads where stone and lime plaster were used to allow travel over marshy areas. These were evident in places. One feature I had not noticed at other sites was the evidence at El Mirador of a wall. Our guide said that this wall was more to delineate areas for the aristocracy and special political and religious spaces, than for protection. In other words, it was there to tell common folks they should stay out. This makes sense as the walls did not seem adequate for defense. This much seemed evident even if they were grown over.
The general overgrown nature of El Mirador makes it more difficult to get good shots of the ruins. If you are close enough to see that there are ruins, you are in a forest. If you are far enough away to get a full shot of a structure, it is mostly obscured by trees. So I have less good photos of El Mirador than of other Mayan cities. It was a unique experience, and one I won’t soon forget. You don’t quite get the same overawed feeling entering the main areas of El Mirador that you experience when walking into the Grand Plaza at Tikal. It feels much more like you are walking among the ruins of an ancient, mysterious culture. It looks as if something magnificent could have been here, but what was it? The intricacy of the art and the complexity of the culture is not as evident. You have a sense that it might be there, under centuries of growth. The magnitude of the task of figuring out what this culture was about hits you as you see how deeply it is buried. You get a lot greater sense of what some of the early anthropologists experienced when they rediscovered many of these places back in the 19th century.
The more one walks around these sites and sees how many structures remain unearthed, it makes you wonder just how many of these ancient cities still lie under the jungle disguised as mounds, waiting to be discovered and studied. I also have a much greater sense of the development of this particular culture. They had huge, developed cities spread out over hundreds of miles. These were not just some tribesmen trying to coax bison into running over a cliff so they could eat for a few days. This was an organized, civilized, probably autocratic, authoritarian culture. They had a shared knowledge base, divisions of labor, and a developed social structure. It was an impressive culture, with a much bigger footprint than I imagined when I set out to visit Chichen Itza in the waning days of 2022.
There were more breaks in the clouds as we floated over the jungle on the way back toward Flores. We flew a bit higher, and hit a few rain drops. The cool air streaming through the tiny open windows in the side of the helicopter felt nice hitting the sticky layer of sweat and mosquito repellent I had acquired hiking around El Mirador. Since we arrived back about an hour early, we beat Humberto. Audrey, Andrew, and I headed into the restaurant on the shore of Lake Peten Itza and had a slush drink. Humberto drove us back in a nice vehicle spewing refrigerated air throughout the cab. I considered how miserable it must have been – even for the nobility – to live out at El Mirador; at least it would have been so for me. I was looking forward to my shower. After a short rest, we walked just a couple dozen yards to a restaurant on the lake where I enjoyed a Guatemalan steak dinner. It had been another nice day.
