The History of the Tulum Ruins

Tulum — known to the Maya as Zamá, meaning “dawn” — is one of the last cities the Maya built, and among the very few they still lived in when Europeans first reached these shores. It stands on a limestone cliff on the Caribbean coast of what is now Quintana Roo, Mexico, protected on three sides by a stone wall and on the fourth by the sea.

A city of the Maya Post-Classic

Most of what you see at Tulum was built during the Post-Classic period, roughly between 1200 and 1521 CE, when the great inland Classic cities had already declined and power on the Yucatán peninsula had shifted toward the coast. The site was occupied earlier, though: the Temple of the Initial Series once held a carved stela recording the date 564 CE, the earliest yet found here, showing that people were active at Tulum centuries before its walls went up.

Through the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries the city flourished as a fortified port, one node in a network of coastal Maya towns strung along the eastern shore of the peninsula.

A walled port on the trade routes

Tulum's wealth came from trade. Sitting where sea routes met the land, it handled goods carried by canoe along the coast and by foot along raised stone roads inland — obsidian and jade, turquoise and copper, cacao, cotton, honey and salt. A break in the offshore reef let canoes land on the small beach directly below the cliff.

It is the only major walled Maya city built on the coast, and the wall — together with the cliff — is what set it apart from its neighbours. Raised roads, or sacbeob, connected the coast to larger inland centres such as Coba, tying Tulum into the wider Maya world.

First contact with Europeans

In 1518, the Spanish expedition of Juan de Grijalva sailed north along this coast. The chaplain Juan Díaz, watching from the ships, described a town “as large as Seville” with a tall tower — almost certainly Tulum. It was one of the first Maya cities Europeans ever recorded, seen from the water before any of them set foot in it.

Tulum was still lived in at Spanish contact and for some decades afterward, but the coastal Maya world was steadily unravelled through the 16th century by conquest and by Old World diseases, and the city was eventually abandoned.

Rediscovery and study

Tulum returned to wider attention in the 1840s, when the American traveller John Lloyd Stephens and the artist Frederick Catherwood documented the ruins and published Catherwood's detailed drawings, bringing the coastal Maya sites to a large audience for the first time. In 1924 the archaeologist Samuel Lothrop, working for the Carnegie Institution, produced the first systematic survey of the site and gave many of the structures the names still used today. It has been a protected archaeological zone under Mexico's INAH ever since.

What the names mean

The Maya called the city Zamá, “dawn” or “morning,” for its position facing the sunrise over the Caribbean. “Tulum,” meaning “wall” or “fence,” is a later name, taken from the feature that defines the site. You can read more about the individual buildings on our architecture page and the origins of the name on the name and meaning page.

Tulum today

Today the Tulum Archaeological Zone is one of Mexico's most-visited ancient sites, drawing travellers from the beaches of Cancún and the Riviera Maya. Most visitors come on a guided day trip — you can compare the best-reviewed options among our top Tulum tours or browse the full list of Tulum ruins tours.