Tulum Ruins

The Yucatec Maya name Tulu'um refers to a fence, wall or trench. According to Wikipedia the city may also have been called Zama, meaning city of dawn, because it faces the sunrise. Tulum served as a port for the inland city of Coba, and coastal and overland trade routes converged here.

Steep sea cliffs protected one side of the city and a wall protected the landward side. Figures for the wall vary by source: an INAH visitor guide gives about 380 metres in length and walls roughly 4 to 8 metres high, while other accounts describe it as about 3 to 5 metres high and 8 metres thick. Five narrow gateways pierced the wall, with small watchtowers at the southwest and northwest corners. A small cove with a sandy beach on the seaward side served as the landing point for trading and fishing canoes, and a small cenote near the northern wall supplied fresh water.

El Castillo is a pyramid about 7.5 metres tall in the central precinct, built in stages over an earlier colonnaded building, and it may have served as a beacon for incoming canoes. The Temple of the Frescoes has a lower gallery and a smaller second-storey gallery and is thought to have been used to track the sun. Figures of the diving god decorate its facade, and a mural on the eastern wall shows influence from the Mixteca-Puebla style of highland Mexico.

The Temple of the Descending God is a single-room temple with a west-facing door built on top of another temple that served as its base. A winged figure with a headdress stands in a niche above the door.

Tulum was one of the last cities the Maya built and inhabited, reaching its greatest prominence between the 13th and 15th centuries; the infobox gives construction as roughly 1200 to 1450. Obsidian was an important trade good, and artifacts found at the site link it to Central Mexico, Central America and the Yucatan, including copper, flint, ceramics, incense burners and gold objects. Jade and obsidian were among the most valuable goods, with obsidian coming from Ixtepeque in northern Guatemala, around 700 kilometres away.

The Maya continued to live there for about 70 years after the Spanish began exploring Mexico, and Wikipedia says the city was abandoned by the end of the 16th century, although its infobox gives a different abandonment date.

Juan Diaz, a member of Juan de Grijalva's 1518 expedition, first mentioned Tulum, and the Spaniards are described as the first Europeans to spot it. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published the first detailed description of the ruins in 1843 in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, mapping the walls and sketching several buildings. Later investigators included Sylvanus Morley, the Carnegie Institution and Samuel Lothrop.

Tulum is close to Cancun and the Riviera Maya and is among the most visited archaeological sites in Mexico, with over 2.2 million visitors in 2017 according to Wikipedia. A private tour with a driver and guide allows a more relaxed visit and helps place the site within the wider story of Maya coastal trade.