Tulum was a walled Maya port trading obsidian hauled from 700 kilometres away
Perched on 12-metre cliffs above the Caribbean, Tulum was among the last cities the Maya built, peaking between the 13th and 15th centuries. A shrine on its shore seems to have guided trading canoes through a gap in the reef, and obsidian arrived from a Guatemalan source nearly 700 kilometres away.
The city served as a port for inland Coba and faced east toward the sunrise, which may explain an older name, Zama, the City of Dawn. Tulum itself is a Yucatec Maya word meaning a wall or fence, and the name fits. On the landward side a stone barrier 3 to 5 metres high and about 8 metres thick ran some 400 metres parallel to the sea, with shorter sides of around 170 metres, watchtowers on two corners and cliffs guarding the rest. Building it demanded huge labour, a sign of how much the Maya valued defence here.
Commerce explains the choice of site. Sea and land routes met at Tulum, and a cove with a landing beach broke the cliffs just opposite an opening in the barrier reef. Traders brought salt and textiles by sea for distribution inland, while feathers and copper went the other way. Canoes could also reach rivers such as the Motagua that led deep into the Guatemalan highlands. Jade and obsidian rank among the most valuable finds, and the sheer density of obsidian marks Tulum as a major exchange centre for it.
Three buildings stand out. El Castillo, a 7.5-metre pyramid raised in stages over an earlier colonnaded building, has serpent carvings on its upper lintels. The Temple of the Frescoes doubled as an observatory for tracking the sun, and figures of a diving or descending god, possibly linked to Venus, decorate it and give another temple its name.
Spaniards on Juan de Grijalva's 1518 expedition were the first Europeans to see the city, and Maya people stayed for roughly 70 years after Spanish exploration began before leaving by the end of the 16th century. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published the first detailed account in 1843, mapping the walls and sketching the Castillo. Much older traces lie beneath: in 2016 divers in nearby flooded caves found the skeleton of a woman of about 30 that may be at least 9,900 years old.
Source: Tulum
