What To Do and See at Monte Alban

The plaza is 300 metres long, there is no shade on it, and most tours give you between ninety minutes and three hours. So the useful question is not what there is to see but what to see first. A Monte Alban half day tour puts the whole of that time on the ridge; the full days spend part of it in the valley instead.

The two-hour version: what to see if that is all you have

Walk the length of the plaza first, before the sun is high and before you are tired. Start at the South Platform and climb it, because it gives you the whole site in one view and everything afterwards makes more sense for it.

Then come down the east side to Building J, spend real time on the carved slabs, cross to Los Danzantes on the west, and finish at the North Platform. That is a complete visit. If you have any time left, use it on the ball court on the way back.

The half-day version

With three hours you can do all of the above without hurrying, climb the North Platform as well as the South, and walk out beyond the plaza to where the terraces and the tomb entrances are. You will also have the twenty minutes the site museum deserves.

Three hours is what the longest half-day tours here give you on site, and it is the most any tour here offers. Anything beyond that is a matter of sitting down, which on an unshaded ridge in the middle of the day is not the pleasure it sounds.

The site museum, and the carvings that are only there

The museum by the entrance is inside your ticket and most visitors walk past it. Over ninety years of excavation, carved stones have been brought in off the plaza to keep them out of the weather — so some of what you came to see is indoors, not out.

Go in on the way out. Twenty minutes is enough, and having the plaza already in your head makes the difference between a case of stones and a set of things you can place.

Tombs, terraces and the walk beyond the plaza

Most people never leave the levelled rectangle, and the hill is considerably bigger than that. North of the main group the ground drops into terraces where the population actually lived, and the entrances to the painted tombs are cut into them.

The interiors are restricted, because the paintings inside are fragile, but the walk out to them is open and it is where the site is quietest. It is also where you get the clearest sense of the terracing that held a city of tens of thousands on the side of a mountain.

The craft villages the day trips add

Most of the tours listed here bolt one or more craft villages onto the ruins, and the villages are not interchangeable. Each makes a different thing, in a different way, and knowing which is which before you book is the difference between a day you chose and a day you were given.

Hierve el Agua, and why it is on so many itineraries

Roughly seventy kilometres east of the ruins, mineral springs have built white terraces down a cliff face that photograph as a frozen waterfall, with bathing pools cut into the rock at the top. It is the other headline sight of the valley and it appears on four of the tours here, all of them private days quoted per group.

Be clear about the trade. Adding it means a long drive each way and, on every one of those four, ninety minutes to two hours at the ruins rather than three. Only one of the four includes both entrance fees; the rest leave you paying cash at two separate gates.

Photographs: where to stand, and when

The whole-plaza shot is from the top of the South Platform, and it wants the sun behind you, which means the first hours of the morning. The Danzantes carvings want raking light rather than overhead sun, so they are better early too.

For the ridge itself — the thing that makes this site unlike any other — walk out past the North Platform and shoot back along the plaza with the valley falling away on both sides. That frame is the one nobody takes and the one that explains the place.