El Mirador

As we got closer to El Mirador, we noticed we were climbing hills which seemed out of place in the forest, walking on a layer crushed white stones and clambering over huge rocks which nature hadn't put there. After we'd climbed over one large mound the path suddenly became flat, wide and very straight. The hills and mounds were Mayan constructions long since reclaimed by the forest and the path followed a  two-thousand year old road, linking this unknown, unnamed site with El Mirador itself.

We reached El Mirador at around 3.30pm. The site consists of four main pyramid complexes - El Mirador itself, La Danta, the temple of Los Monos (The Monkeys) and Los Gemelos (The Twins). We camped in a large clearing at the base of El Mirador, about 10 minutes walk from Los Monos; Los Gemelos and La Danta were further away, a couple of kilometres through the forest. There are many other smaller pyramids and constructions around a huge area of forest which a small team is slowly excavating and clearing.

El Mirador is 70m high, about the same as a 20-storey building. La Danta is taller, at 105m, and Los Monos and Los Gemelos are around 50m. All the structures consist of a huge base pyramid about 30m high (La Danta covers 18000m², almost 135m on each side), with as many as seven smaller pyramids on top. The forest has grown over the whole structure, and only the very tops of the highest pyramids have been cleared, with a steep path to scramble up.

We climbed El Mirador in time to watch the sun set. The cleared top is maybe half the size of a tennis court and forms a platform 40m above the tops of the trees; reaching the top literally took my breath away and I found myself turning round and round trying to take in 2000km² of untouched forest, the tops of trees stretching to the horizon in all directions, unbroken apart from the tops of other pyramids, in the El Mirador group and even deeper into the forest. Above us, the sky was huge, clear and pale blue, the air was cool and still and filled with the noise of monkeys, birds and insects as the sun went down.

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