I've also looked at the actual rooms and they're beautiful. This is a small hotel that's brand new, with only 20 rooms. The reviews are stellar.
I talked about the first day and what we'll be doing, but the second day is kind of up to us. I've decided I want to visit Valladolid and the hidden ruins near the city. Valladolid is a place where art and architecture are at the forefront, with beautiful pastel buildings and old historic churches, and the cuisine is reportedly incredible. Valladolid has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.
Valladolid has historical colonial buildings including a 16th-century Convent of San Bernardino of Siena, with an ornate wooden altarpiece, and Casa de los Venados has Mexican folk art and furnishings.
Then there's the baroque-style San Gervasio Cathedral. The towering Iglesia de San Servicio (sometimes called the Cathedral San Gervasio) is located just south of the main square in Valladolid. The Spaniards built this cathedral over a demolished Mayan pyramid, using some of the pyramid's original stones to build the cathedral itself.
And Valladolid is still off the beaten path, so it offers authentic Mexican culture and history that you just can’t find in the touristy beach towns like Cancun and even Tulum. I imagine Valladolid will be a gem.
But the hidden ruins of Ek Balam are the real gem.
Ek Balam is one of the more mysterious ruins in the Yucatan, because most of it still hasn’t been fully excavated. The ruins have been mapped, but only the center has been uncovered, so exploring them is bound to be exciting! Ek Balam is actually considered an archaeological site. In 800 AD it was home to over 20,000 people.
The site is noted for the preservation of the plaster on the tomb of Ukit Kan Lek Tok', a king buried in the side of the largest pyramid. As I said, only the center of Ek’ Balam has been excavated. Large, raised platforms line the interior wall, surrounding internal plazas. Sacbé roads stem off of the center in the four cardinal directions, an architectural allusion to the idea of a “four-part cosmos”. Sacbe' roads were considered to be sacred. They're usually white sand paths that are arranged around a sacred site.
In rooms of the Acropolis, wall paintings consisting of texts have been found, including the 'Mural of the 96 Glyphs', a masterwork of calligraphy comparable to the 'Tablet of the 96 Glyphs' from Palenque. Another wall painting of the Acropolis features a mythological scene with a hunted deer, which has been interpreted as the origin of death.
A series of vault capstones depict the lightning deity, a specific decoration also known from other Yucatec sites, called God K or K'awiil. God K is fascinating to me. I'm learning to appreciate the aesthetic of the designs in the Yucatan, too, including the grimaces and lolling tongues and snakes depicted everywhere including on the God K capstones.
Although I couldn't find a damn thing on the internet about the hardness of Stucco, I did run across some information about how hard stucco was back in the day and how modernization didn't really improve its strength. So when the Yucatec cultures were building and carving things made of stucco, which is just lime and sand, they were working on super hard, sun baked surfaces! And did you know baroque buildings were historically made with interior stucco made of the same recipe as the Mayan and Aztec buildings? This blew my mind.
Ek Balam and Valladolid are two places I can hardly wait to see. I doubt I'll figure out why Ek Balam was deserted so suddenly, but the mystery is bound to intrigue me even more when I'm standing in the middle of those ancient ruins.
Here. Have a couple photos of Ek Balam:
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