Tulum

Tulum is the ruin of a walled Maya coastal city on cliffs above the Caribbean Sea in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, built between about 1200 and 1450 AD as a major trading port serving the larger city of Coba. Among the best-preserved coastal Maya sites, it is enclosed by a defensive wall roughly 400 meters long and three to five meters high, evidence of how seriously its builders treated fortification. Its most prominent structure, El Castillo, is a pyramid about 7.5 meters tall that may have doubled as a beacon for seaborne traders, while the Temple of the Frescoes appears to have served as an astronomical observatory and the Temple of the Descending God carries sculpture of a winged deity. Tulum reached its height in the 13th to 15th centuries, was still occupied when the Spanish arrived around 1518, and was abandoned by the end of that century.