Tikal is a Maya city whose limestone temples still stand clear above the rainforest that swallowed it. Six great pyramids break through the canopy, their roofcombs visible from kilometres away, and the rest of the city lies under trees between them. Temple IV is the tallest at about sixty-five metres, among the highest structures the Americas built before Columbus. Temple I, the Temple of the Great Jaguar, is a forty-seven-metre tomb; the ruler sealed inside it was found only in 1962. The city's own people called it Yax Mutal. Founded more than two thousand years ago, it grew into one of the great powers of the Maya world, and around AD 800 it may have held eighty thousand people. After generations of drought it emptied over the ninth and tenth centuries. A 2018 laser survey of the wider Petén traced tens of thousands of hidden structures, so Tikal ran far beyond the ruins cleared from the jungle.
What makes Tikal feel less like a ruin than a lost world is the forest it shares. Climb the stairs to the top of a temple and the rainforest opens flat to the horizon, broken only by the grey roofcombs of other temples standing out of the green like islands. At dawn mist pools in the canopy, howler monkeys start a roar you feel in your chest, and toucans clatter overhead. Spider monkeys cross the branches and coatis nose along the paths below. Jaguars still hunt this forest at night, though almost nobody sees them. The Great Plaza is the heart of it: a grassy square where Temples I and II face each other and the North Acropolis climbs along one side. This double life — a first-rank archaeological city inside a protected block of jungle — is why Tikal is listed as both a cultural and a natural site.