Palenque is an old city from the Maya civilization and a Unesco World Heritage site! This ancient site is about 1,780 hectares and has about 1,400 documented buildings. Surprisingly, only 10% of the ancient city has been uncovered! Archaeologists haven’t uncovered the other 90% because if they did, the buildings could crumble and fall. When excavating there are many important steps necessary to preserve and recover the historic importance of each building, hence it is done with caution and fairly restricted to avoid damage or loss of information and historic significance.

If the archaeologists are to leave the buildings untouched, they could be around for thousands of more years.

Palenque’s original name is Lakamha (pronounced la-cama) meaning ‘Big Water’ in Spanish. The reason that Palenque was called ‘Big Water’ is because there are several creeks, springs, and rivers in the area. Palenque had several aqueducts that carried water throughout the ancient city, this was important for survival.

We spent roughly 1 hour at the old buildings, but also took a cool 40-45 minute hike that twisted through the lush jungle. Along the hike, there were a few rumbles like the picture above that nobody has uncovered. At a river, there was a bridge that we could tell looked pretty old, maybe from the Mayan. Next to the bridge, there was a little “pool” that seemed to be made by the Mayans as well. As we were looking for stones at this river, we heard this strange sound. We followed the sound and saw…

Monkeys! There are several monkeys in the area of Palenque and they’re called Howler Monkeys. You can hear their calls from pretty far away. They were sitting up in the trees, calling to each other. We think that the monkeys that we saw were mainly males and they were calling to each other to get the other monkeys to stay away. Pretty territorial.

All in all, Palenque was a unique and really fun place to visit. I recommend visiting it if you happen to be around the Palenque area.