Sacred & ancient places.

The vast city of pyramids the Aztecs later called “the place where the gods were created.”

The Maya city whose pyramid still catches the equinox serpent of light on its steps.

A Zapotec capital levelled from a ridge-top, floating above the valley of Oaxaca.

The rainforest Maya city of Pakal, where fine stone temples meet the jungle canopy.

Petrified “waterfalls” of mineral springs, a Zapotec bathing and ritual site for millennia.

The most sacred land of the Wixárika people, endpoint of an ancient pilgrimage across the desert.

The most visited Catholic shrine in the Americas, on a hill that was sacred long before it.

A cliff-ringed Pueblo Mágico with a mountaintop pyramid and a long reputation as an energy centre.

A walled Maya port on a limestone cliff above the Caribbean, and one of the last Maya cities still lived in when Spanish ships first passed by.

A Late Classic Maya capital in the dry Puuc hills, its limestone palaces covered in masks of the rain god Chaac.

A vast Maya capital hidden in the Campeche jungle, once the seat of the Snake Kingdom that fought Tikal for control of the lowlands.

The largest pyramid ever built by volume, now a grass-covered hill topped by a colonial church, with pilgrims still climbing to the summit.

A ruined Gulf Coast city whose Pyramid of the Niches carries one carved recess for every day of the solar year.

A Zapotec city of the dead in Oaxaca, walled in stone mosaic fretwork found nowhere else in Mesoamerica.

The great twin temple at the heart of the Aztec capital, buried under Mexico City for centuries and brought back to light in 1978.

A sprawling Maya city in the Quintana Roo jungle, hub of the ancient world's largest network of raised white stone roads.

A Classic Maya city on a horseshoe bend of the Usumacinta River, reachable only by boat, whose carved lintels record its rulers and their rituals.

The Olmec capital of La Venta was one of the earliest planned cities in Mesoamerica, famous for its colossal basalt heads and one of the first great earthen pyramids.

Two great volcanoes east of Mexico City, one smoking and alive, the other still as a sleeping woman, honoured by the Nahua as living beings.

One of the world's largest limestone cave systems, used for ceremonies in pre-Hispanic times and protected today as a national park.

A dormant volcano in the State of México whose summit crater holds two high lakes where people left offerings for centuries.

A sacred Maya cave near Chichén Itzá where an untouched chamber of rain-god censers surrounds a stone column shaped like the world tree.

A canyon shrine to a Black Christ that grew over an older cave cult, and Mexico's second most important pilgrimage site after Guadalupe.

A Tzotzil Maya town whose whitewashed church shelters a living religion practised on a floor of pine needles, by candlelight and copal smoke.

A Maya holy city where a giant Franciscan convent sits on a flattened pyramid platform and Maya temples still rise between the streets.

A 20-metre bronze Christ the King crowns the Cerro del Cubilete, a Guanajuato hill long claimed as the geographic center of Mexico and rebuilt as a national pilgrimage site after the Cristero War.

A vast volcanic monolith rising over a small Querétaro town, sacred to the Otomí-Chichimeca and widely known today as an energy site.

A lakeside town in the Veracruz rainforest that Mexico knows as its capital of folk magic and healers.