The Structures of Monte Alban

Almost nothing on the plaza carries a label, and what labelling there is sits in Spanish on a handful of boards. This page is the key: what each building is, what period it belongs to and what is worth crossing 300 metres of grass to look at. Booking a Monte Alban guided tour is the other way to get the same information, delivered standing in front of it.

Reading the Main Plaza: a levelled mountaintop

The first thing to understand is that the ground itself is a building. The summit was cut down and filled out by hand until it formed a level rectangle roughly 300 metres by 150, and the terraces, dams and canals that hold it in place run down the slopes on every side. Everything else stands on that platform.

The plaza runs north to south. A great platform closes each end, a line of structures runs down the east side, matching complexes face them from the west, and a short row sits along the centre. Once that shape is in your head the site stops being a scatter of mounds, which is the moment most visits improve.

Los Danzantes: three hundred stones and a name that stuck

Set into a wall on the west side are the carved slabs that gave Building L its popular name. Over three hundred have been recorded. The figures are naked, their limbs are loose and their eyes are often closed, and nineteenth-century observers read the postures as dance.

They are almost certainly captives: tortured, sacrificed, and in several cases named by the glyphs beside them. They belong to the site's earliest phase, which makes them among the oldest monumental carvings anywhere in the valley. Many of the originals have been moved indoors over the last ninety years to protect them from the weather, so plan on the site museum as well as the wall.

Building J, the one that faces the wrong way

Standing on its own in the centre of the plaza is a building shaped like an arrowhead and set at an angle to everything around it. Nothing else on the site shares its orientation, and that alone makes it the structure people photograph most and understand least.

Its outer walls carry more than forty carved slabs of the Monte Alban II period. Each one pairs a place-name glyph with an inverted head beneath it, which is the standard Mesoamerican shorthand for a settlement brought under control. Read as a set, they are a list. Whether the list is a record of what was conquered or an advertisement for what was claimed is a live argument, and it is the single most interesting thing to be standing in front of here.

The ball court, and what is and is not known about the game

On the north-east side of the plaza is a sunken court in the shape of a capital I, with sloping sides and stone benches. It is one of two known at the site. There are no rings here of the kind found at Chichen Itza, and the sloping walls were probably playing surfaces rather than seating.

What the game meant at this particular place is not established. Ball courts across Mesoamerica carried ritual weight and in some contexts a lethal outcome, and it is tempting to import that wholesale. The honest position is that the architecture is certain and the ceremony is inferred.

The North Platform: the largest thing on the site

Closing the plaza at its northern end is the biggest structure here, reached by a monumental staircase that is itself one of the more impressive pieces of engineering on the hill. On top is a sunken patio surrounded by its own buildings — effectively a second, private plaza raised above the public one.

Climb it for the sense of scale rather than the view. Standing at the head of that staircase and looking the length of the plaza is the clearest available demonstration of what the levelling actually achieved.

The South Platform: the climb everyone makes

At the opposite end is the platform most visitors go up, and it is the right choice if you are only going up one. From the top the entire plaza lies below you in one frame, with the valley on three sides beyond it.

The stairway is steep, the treads are uneven and there is no handrail. Travellers on the tours listed here say exactly that in their own reviews, and they also say everyone in the group managed it. Take it slowly and use the flat ground at the top for the photographs.

Systems IV and M, and why they mirror each other

Along the west side of the plaza stand two complexes built to nearly the same design: a temple set on a platform behind a walled forecourt, each with its own small courtyard. They face the eastern range across the open ground.

The repetition is the point. Whatever these buildings were for, there were two of them, deliberately alike and deliberately paired, which tells you something about how the plaza was used even though it does not tell you what happened inside.

El Palacio and the tombs beyond the plaza

On the east side is a residential range published by the excavators as El Palacio, a courtyard building of a domestic rather than a ceremonial plan — a reminder that people lived on the summit as well as processing across it.

Beyond the plaza, north of the main group, are the painted tombs numbered 104 and 105, cut into the terraces with murals and carved doorways. Access to the interiors is restricted, and rightly: the paintings are fragile. The most famous chamber of all, Tomb 7, is also outside the plaza, and what came out of it is on the history page rather than in the ground.

What is in the site museum, and why it was moved indoors

The museum stands by the entrance and is covered by the same ticket. It holds carved stones brought in off the plaza over ninety years of excavation, including Danzantes slabs and material from the tombs, kept out of the rain and the sun.

Give it twenty minutes on the way out rather than the way in. Seeing the plaza first and the carvings afterwards puts each stone back in a place you can actually picture, which is the opposite of how most people do it.