Teotihuacán is located 50 km outside Mexico City. Built between the 1st and 7th centuries A.D., it is characterized by the vast size of its monuments – in particular, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, and the site is all laid out on geometric and symbolic principles.
It has the longest history of exploration in Mexico – the first surveys date from 1864, and the first excavations from 1884. However, it is still not known who actually built the city as it has components of different cultures including Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec. What is known is that it was a very important city in the heart of Mexico, and at one point it was the sixth-largest city in the world and up to 200,000 people lived there.
Teotihuacán is still revered today, and the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon are considered among the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids constructed during that time.
It is of course now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
We decided to get up early to catch the bus in the hope of getting there ahead of most people. It took us 45 minutes to take the metro to the north bus terminal and find the ticket counter for ‘Los Pyramides’. The bus station is clean, safe, and well organised with each counter well branded and destinations clear.
We left on time and joined the morning traffic. Getting out of the city was a breeze, and a literal breeze from an open window and skylight actually made us a bit chilly. We did however clock how the traffic into the city was gridlocked for kilometers. After about an hour we were dropped at Gate 2 of the site. There was no doubt that we were there, as we’d approached it the pyramid of the sun was clearly visible at the end of the road, it was quite a spectacular entrance.
The site covers 20 square kilometers. It was home to many multi-family residential buildings, along with temples, palaces, and of course the pyramids. All the main structures are connected by the Avenue of the Dead – a long road that directly faces the extinct volcano Cerro Gordo.
Its scale is impressive and gate 2 was a great place to enter to see the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon first. There were plenty of people already there but it was still quiet enough to not feel busy and there was good opportunity for photos without people in, though at the same time the scale of the place is only really visible when you put a person in the picture.
After walking down to the pyramid of the moon via a painting of a jaguar we walked the length of the Avenue of the Dead to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Past the pyramid of the sun the Avenue had what can only be described as wide walls with steps either side that had to be climbed up and over at regular intervals. It was warm in the constant sun but a breeze helped keep it tolerable (we later found a track running around the edge of the site which we took on the way back, it was equally exposed but had a couple of spots with trees providing shade and was flat). On the way there were ruins at the side to explore, what is left is mostly at ground level and below, and we found a section where there is a short underground walkway that allows you to see the layers of the smaller pyramids and how they have been added to over the top over time so to reveal their full history is to peel the layers back like an onion.
We continued to the end and visited the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, it has some very cool history to it but to look at it is basically a smaller pyramid surrounded in the middle of this huge square walled space.
We then turned back and taking the faster flat outside track back visited the museum by the pyramid of the sun before leaving the site about 4 hours later. We had to ask around to find out where the bus stop and happily it was next to a stall selling mango slices. We only had to wait 10-15 minutes before a bus arrived.
The journey back to the city was slow, the traffic we had seen backed up to enter the city in the morning obviously just doesn’t clear. So we inches along. Emma fell asleep through heat and boredom. As she was in a happy slumber of resignation Marie suddenly poked and alarmed her with a ‘wake up now wake up! Get off the bus’ it had stopped and a lot of people were getting off and she had spotted that was because there was a metro station, so we bailed off the bus super fast, then got our bearing. It turned out that it was on the line that we would have to take back to our hotel and it not only saved us time crawling the last stretch to the bus station but also it saved a change on the metro we were pretty stoked.
We got back in time to go back to the fabric shop street to find some material to make one of Marie’s shorts pocket bigger as she can only just squeeze her phone into it (it’s attached to her belt loop so it’s not for security but because it’s a real pain in the ass to get in each time) which we got, only to later discover the pocket is too complicated to easily make bigger. We got back to our street in time to grab a coffee and another street quesadilla dinner.
Marie & Emma's Travel Journal 