The Structures of the Tulum Ruins

Tulum is a small site and its buildings are small buildings. What makes them worth an hour is not scale — it is that they are the best-preserved coastal Maya architecture anywhere, and that several of them still carry the carving and painted stucco that has been lost almost everywhere else.

What you are looking at, before the individual buildings

Almost every wall you see was originally rendered in stucco and painted, much of it red. The rough limestone finish that reads as “ruin” is the underlying structure, not the intended surface. Tulum's builders also leaned their walls slightly outward from the base — a habit of Postclassic east-coast architecture that gives the buildings their distinctive top-heavy look once you notice it.

El Castillo

The building everyone photographs, and the reason the postcards look the way they do. It is not a tall stepped pyramid — it is a broad, low platform right on the cliff edge, with a wide central staircase and a squat temple on top whose doorway is divided by two columns. It stands about 7.5 metres above the platform, and the platform stands on a 12-metre limestone cliff, which is what does the work in a photograph. It faces the sea, and the two small windows in its upper chamber line up with the gap in the reef.

Looking at it. Stand at the north end of the site and look back along the cliff. From there you get El Castillo, the cliff and the water in one frame, which you cannot get from the front.

Temple of the Frescoes

The most informative building on the site and the one most people walk past. Its inner chamber carries the best-surviving painted murals at Tulum — blue-green figures on a dark ground — and its outer facade still holds stucco reliefs, including seated figures and a mask at each corner of the lower storey. It was built in stages, and you can read the stages in the masonry.

Looking at it. The murals are behind a rope and the light is poor. Go early, when the sun is low enough to reach into the chamber.

Temple of the Descending God

A small building on the north side of El Castillo, named for the figure above its doorway: an upside-down human form, head down and legs up, arms held to the sides, as though diving. The same figure appears elsewhere on the site. Nobody can tell you with certainty who he is — the honest readings run from the setting sun to the bee god to Venus — and the guides who say otherwise are guessing.

Looking at it. It is small and it is easy to miss. Look up at the doorway, not at the building.

House of the Halach Uinic

Named for the title of a Maya ruler — roughly “the real man”, the highest office in a Maya polity. A large structure with a colonnaded front, decorated with more descending figures. Whether a ruler actually lived here is inference from the building's size and position rather than anything written down.

Looking at it. Its scale is the point. Compare it to the small temples and the difference is obvious.

House of the Columns

One of the larger residential buildings in the walled area, with the row of columns that gives it its name. Tulum's elite lived inside the wall; most of the population lived outside it, in buildings that have not survived.

Looking at it. This is where the site stops being a temple complex and starts being a town.

The wall

The thing the site is named after. A wall runs along three landward sides — roughly 400 metres by 170 — three to five metres thick and three to five metres high, with narrow gateways and watch positions at the corners. The fourth side is the cliff, which needed no wall.

Looking at it. Walk to a gateway and look at how narrow it is. That is a defensive decision, not an architectural one.

The structures side by side

What has not survived

The great majority of Tulum's population lived outside the wall in perishable buildings — wood, thatch, packed earth — and none of that is left. What is standing is the elite quarter: temples, the ruler's house, and the buildings of the people who ran the port. Reading the walled area as the whole city is the commonest mistake visitors make, and it is why what Tulum was for is a separate question from what is standing.