Copán holds the longest text the Maya ever carved — and most of it can no longer be read in the right order. Some 2,200 glyphs climb a single staircase, the dynastic record of a kingdom that ruled this Honduran valley for four centuries. Earthquakes brought the upper flight down, and when Carnegie archaeologists rebuilt it between 1936 and 1942 nobody could yet read Maya writing; they set the fallen blocks back roughly two-thirds out of sequence, and epigraphers have been re-sorting the sentences ever since. The staircase was itself an answer to a disaster. In 738 the king Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil — "18 Rabbit" — was seized by the ruler of Quiriguá, a vassal town downriver, and beheaded there; Copán raised no monuments for seventeen years. His second successor then enlarged the stairway into a wall of royal history, and the dynasty later cut Altar Q, where all sixteen kings sit in a ring, each passing power to the next.
The Great Plaza below is a forest of standing kings. Copán's sculptors worked soft volcanic tuff rather than the hard limestone of other Maya cities, so they could cut behind an arm or a headdress and carve almost in the round: on Stela F and Stela H the face and hands of 18 Rabbit stand clear of the block, and the shadows shift across them as the sun moves. Scarlet macaws — Honduras's national bird, released back into this valley since 2011 — cross the plaza in loud red flashes. The city was abandoned around 800 CE and swallowed by forest until Stephens and Catherwood drew it in 1841; it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980. The stairway now shelters under a canvas roof, and a separate ticket takes you into tunnels beneath the Acropolis to Rosalila, an entire earlier temple the Maya buried whole rather than tear down.