Overview
Uxmal lies in the low Puuc hills of the western Yucatán Peninsula, about 60 kilometres south of Mérida. Its name is usually translated as "thrice built." Unlike the great cities of the Maya lowlands to the south, Uxmal had no rivers, lakes, or natural cenotes for water, and depended instead on rainfall stored in numerous plastered underground cisterns (chultuns) — a fact reflected in the obsessive repetition of masks of Chaac, the hook-nosed rain god, across its façades. The city flourished in the Late and Terminal Classic periods, roughly 600–1000 CE, with a peak population that may have reached around 15,000–25,000.
Uxmal is the showcase of the Puuc architectural style, characterised by smooth lower walls of finely cut limestone veneer surmounted by elaborately decorated upper friezes assembled from thousands of pre-cut mosaic stones — geometric lattices, colonnettes imitating bundled reeds, step-frets, and serpent and Chaac motifs. The Pyramid of the Magician (or Pyramid of the Soothsayer) dominates the site: an unusual structure with rounded, elliptical sides rising in several superimposed phases, wrapped in legend as the work of a dwarf magician built in a single night.
The Nunnery Quadrangle — so named by the Spanish for its resemblance to a convent — is a large courtyard enclosed by four richly decorated buildings, considered one of the masterpieces of Maya architecture. The Governor's Palace, raised on a vast artificial platform, has a façade nearly 100 metres long covered with an intricate mosaic frieze of some 20,000 cut stones, and is aligned to the rising point of Venus, reflecting the Maya concern with that planet. A ball court and the House of the Turtles complete the ceremonial core. Uxmal was connected by a raised causeway (sacbe) to the nearby centre of Kabah and dominated a cluster of Puuc cities.
The city declined around 1000 CE, for reasons that remain debated but probably involved the same combination of drought, political instability, and shifting trade that affected the wider Maya world. It was never entirely forgotten, and was described by the explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s.