Izamal

Long before the Spanish arrived, Izamal was a Maya city of the northern Yucatán plain, probably its largest. It grew as a religious centre named for Itzamná, the creator god, and drew pilgrims to temples of the sun god Kinich Ahau. Its peak came in the Classic period, roughly 250 to 900 CE, when the great pyramids were raised.

When the Franciscans came in the mid 1500s, they did not build beside the Maya city. They built on top of it, tearing down a large pyramid and raising their convent on its leveled platform. Izamal has carried both histories at once ever since.

Five huge pre-Hispanic structures still stand inside the modern town, and around 80 have been catalogued in all. The largest, Kinich Kak Moo, is a solar pyramid about 35 metres high whose base runs nearly 200 metres a side, among the biggest buildings by volume in Mexico.

Above the main square rises the Convento de San Antonio de Padua, begun in 1549 and finished in 1561. Its walled atrium is one of the largest of any church in the world, and the whole complex sits on the flattened base of a Maya temple. Pyramids and cloister share the same few blocks.

To the Maya, Izamal was a place of the gods, tied to Itzamná and to the sun. Sacbeob, raised white stone roads, once ran from here to other cities, marking it as a hub of pilgrimage.

That role never really ended, it changed shape. Izamal is now the most important Marian shrine of the Yucatán Peninsula, home to Our Lady of Izamal, patroness of the state. According to devotion the image was crowned by Pope Pius XII in 1949, and Pope John Paul II came in 1993 to give it a silver crown and to meet with the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The convent was founded by Fray Diego de Landa, later Bishop of Yucatán. He is remembered in two ways. In 1562 he ordered Maya books and sacred images burned, destroying much of a written culture.

Yet his own account of Maya life and writing, set down to justify the conquest, became one of the few keys later scholars had to the Maya script. Izamal holds that contradiction in stone: a Christian shrine built from a Maya one, by the man who tried to erase it.

Almost the entire old town is painted a deep golden yellow with white trim. By a common account the colours honour the Virgin and the Vatican and were tied to the 1993 papal visit, though the story varies.

Izamal has been a Pueblo Mágico since 2002 and sits on Mexico's UNESCO tentative list. People call it the City of Three Cultures, Maya, colonial, and living present, and all three are visible in a short walk.