El Caracol Observatory

For the Maya, the planet Venus was no idle point of light. Its cycle was bound up with prophecy and ritual and even the timing of war, and it was woven together with the 260-day sacred count and the 365-day solar year. A building like El Caracol, the round observatory at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, gave sky-watchers a way to track exactly the celestial events that guided such decisions. The cylindrical tower, its upper dome worn and broken, rises from a rectangular platform, with a broad staircase climbing the front toward a shadowed doorway.