Teotihuacan, the city the Aztecs found already abandoned

By the time the Aztecs rose to power in the valley of Mexico, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the great city to the north-east of their capital had been deserted for roughly seven hundred years. Its pyramids were overgrown hills, its avenue a long ruined line through the fields. The Aztecs were so impressed that they decided it could only have been built by gods, and they called it Teotihuacan, usually translated as the place where the gods were born, or where men became gods. In their story, it was here that the gods had gathered and sacrificed themselves to create the sun and moon.

The name stuck. What the city's builders called it, and what language they spoke, is unknown. They left no texts that can be read in the way Maya inscriptions can. What they left instead is one of the largest cities of the ancient world.

A city laid out on a line

At its height, around the middle of the first millennium AD, Teotihuacan covered a large area and had a population usually estimated at well over a hundred thousand, which would have made it one of the largest cities on earth at the time. It was planned. Its spine is a broad avenue running for more than two kilometres, which the Aztecs called the Avenue of the Dead because they took the mounds along it for tombs. In fact they are the platforms of temples and palaces.

The Pyramid of the Sun stands on the eastern side of the avenue, the largest structure in the city and one of the largest pyramids in the Americas. The Pyramid of the Moon closes the avenue at its northern end, set against a mountain whose outline it echoes. Between them, at the southern end, is the Citadel, a vast sunken square that contains the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, its facade studded with carved heads of serpents and of a creature with goggle-like eyes, sometimes identified as a rain or war god.

Beyond the monuments, archaeologists have found the remains of thousands of apartment compounds, where families lived in rooms around courtyards, many of them painted with murals. Some neighbourhoods appear to have been home to people from other parts of Mexico, including the Oaxaca valley and the Maya region, which suggests a cosmopolitan city with a reach far beyond the valley.

Why it emptied

Around the sixth or seventh century AD, the centre of Teotihuacan was burned. The fires were concentrated on the temples and the elite buildings along the avenue, which has led some archaeologists to think of an uprising against the city's rulers, rather than an attack from outside. Drought, crop failure and long decline may all have played a part. Whatever the cause, the population fell away, and the city never recovered its importance.

Its influence did not end with it. Teotihuacan's style can be traced in pottery and architecture across Mesoamerica, and the Maya recorded contacts with it in their own inscriptions. The feathered serpent honoured on its temple became one of the great gods of later Mexico, known to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.

Visiting, early

Teotihuacan lies about an hour's drive north-east of central Mexico City, which makes it an easy day out and a busy one. The site is large and exposed, at a high altitude, with very little shade; it is best seen early in the day, with water and a hat. The Pyramid of the Sun used to be climbed by almost every visitor, but access to the summits has been restricted in recent years, and it is worth checking what is open before you go.

Several tours include it near the start, while they are based in the capital. Just You's A Mexican Adventure, fifteen nights for solo travellers, begins in Mexico City and Teotihuacan before heading to Puebla, Oaxaca and Monte Albán, then on through Chiapas to Palenque, Campeche, Mérida and Chichén Itzá.

Explore Worldwide's Contrasts of Mexico, fourteen nights, starts the same way, with Mexico City and Teotihuacan, then travels through Oaxaca and its valleys to the Sumidero Canyon and San Cristóbal de las Casas, and on into Guatemala and Belize. Its departures run through much of the year. Explore's A Taste of Mexico: Markets and Mayan Sites, thirteen nights, also visits Teotihuacan from the capital, in a trip built around Mexico's food.

What stays with most visitors is the sense of scale and of absence. The avenue runs straight to the mountain, the pyramids are enormous, and the people who built them have left no name of their own. The Aztecs, standing on the same spot, felt it too.