Guatemala Guide
Petén
El Mirador
El Mirador is perhaps the most exotic and mysterious Maya site of all. Encircled by the Petén and Campeche jungles, this massive city surpasses Tikal's scale although we are only now beginning to piece together its history. We're not even certain of its name – el mirador means "the lookout" in Spanish – but it could have been Ox Te Tun (The Birthplace of the Gods). Until the 1980s, it was assumed Mirador was a large city from the Classic era that flourished at the same time as Tikal, Copán and Palenque. As excavations have intensified this theory has been totally overthrown, and we now know that Mirador was a Preclassic capital of unprecedented scale, and its fall around 150 AD was just the first of two catastrophic collapses suffered by the Maya civilization.
The ruins are surrounded by some of the densest tropical forests in the Americas, and you're sure to encounter some spectacular wildlife, including the resident troops of howler and spider monkeys, toucans and perhaps even a scarlet macaw. Wild-cat numbers in the proposed Mirador Basin National Park that surrounds the ruins are some of the healthiest in Latin America, with an estimated four hundred jaguar, as well as ocelot, jaguarundi and puma.