A great pre-Columbian Maya city in the northern Yucatán of Mexico, which rose in the Terminal Classic and dominated much of the northern lowlands between roughly 800 and 1100 CE before declining by about 1200 to 1250. Its monuments include El Castillo (the Temple of Kukulcán), the largest Mesoamerican ball court, the round Caracol, the Temple of the Warriors, and the Sacred Cenote into which offerings were thrown. Famous for a blend of Maya and central-Mexican styles whose origin scholars now debate, it remained a place of pilgrimage after its decline and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a New 7 Wonders of the World.
At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the late-afternoon sun strikes the staircase of a stone pyramid in the Yucatán and casts a row of triangular shadows down its edge. The shadows line up with a carved serpent head at the base, so that a snake of light seems to slither down the steps. Thousands of people now gather to watch it. The pyramid is El Castillo, the heart of Chichén Itzá, a Maya city that once ruled much of northern Yucatán. For centuries scholars explained the city's odd, hybrid look by inventing a conquest that may never have happened. The serpent on the stairs is real and probably intended. The crowd around it, and much of the story told to that crowd, is a far more recent creation.