Xunantunich and Caracol: New Finds in Belize's Maya Cities

Belize gets sold as a beach country, but its deepest story sits seventy miles inland, in Cayo District, where two of the greatest Maya cities ever built keep quietly rewriting the history books. Between January 2025 and late 2026, archaeologists pulled a founding king out of the ground at Caracol and found a 1,300-year-old art school hidden inside Xunantunich's main pyramid. If you only know Belize for its reef, here is the inland reason to pay attention.

Xunantunich: The River-Bluff City You Can Still Climb

Xunantunich sits on a ridge above the Mopan River, so close to Guatemala that the border is barely half a mile west. The name joins xunaan, "noble lady," and tuunich, "stone," giving "Maiden of the Rock." You still reach it the old way: a free hand-cranked ferry across the river from San José Succotz, then a short uphill walk to the plaza. The star is El Castillo, 130 feet tall and the second-highest structure in Belize, its lower walls still carrying the carved stucco friezes of the tree of life. The tree-of-life imagery is the above-ground half of a story that runs straight underground here, which we covered in our piece on the Maya and their sacred caves.

An Ancient Art School Inside El Castillo

In 2026, archaeologists working inside El Castillo found two rooms whose plaster walls are covered in roughly 400 drawings: monkeys, human figures, hieroglyphs, calendar dates, a sage in a headdress, a ballplayer. What makes the find extraordinary is the spread of skill. One monkey is beautifully rendered; beside it are rougher, wobblier attempts by hands still learning.

"It's almost as if somebody was saying, OK, this is how you draw a monkey. Now you try, you try, you try," archaeologist Kathryn Brown told researchers. Nearby the team uncovered what looks like student housing, complete with a sweat bath, gaming boards, and rooms with benches, and just east of it a shrine holding the burial of a figure the team believes was a shaman, laid to rest with two carved shell disks showing a deer-headed figure holding its own eye as it communes with the Vision Serpent. Archaeology Magazine's Off the Grid feature walks through the full find.

Caracol: The Superpower the Jungle Kept Hidden

Drive about 25 miles south and you reach Caracol, a city the jungle swallowed so completely that for most of the twentieth century it barely existed on any map. The Maya knew it as Uxwitza', "Three Water Hill," a nod to the aguadas and reservoirs that made the Vaca Plateau habitable, the same water-storage thinking behind the region's ancient Maya wells. At its peak Caracol covered roughly 200 square kilometers, an urban footprint bigger than present-day Belize City, crowned by Caana, the "Sky Palace," which at 141 feet is the tallest human-made structure in the country. In AD 562 Caracol pulled off the upset of the Classic era: it defeated Tikal, the superpower next door in Guatemala, and reshaped lowland politics for a generation.

The Tomb of Caracol's First King

For more than four decades the Caracol Archaeological Project, led by Drs. Arlen and Diane Chase of the University of Houston, mapped the city without ever finding a single confirmed royal tomb. That changed in the January 2025 field season, when the team broke into a burial chamber beneath a shrine in the Northeast Acropolis and found Te' K'ab Chaak, the ruler who took the throne around AD 331 and founded the dynasty that would govern Caracol for nearly five centuries.

The tomb was furnished like a seat of power: jadeite jewelry, elaborately carved pottery showing rulers and bound captives, bone tubes, Pacific spondylus shells, and a mosaic jadeite death mask. The burial also carried green obsidian blades from Pachuca, Teotihuacan-style atlatl points, and traces of Mexican-style cremation, evidence that Caracol's first kings traded and politicked with the great central Mexican city of Teotihuacan more than 1,200 kilometers away. The National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) called it one of the most important discoveries in recent memory, and it quietly moves Belize from the edge of the Maya world to the middle of it.

Two Cities, Two Stories, Both in Cayo

Put them side by side and the contrast is the point. Xunantunich was the elegant river-bluff ceremonial center, a place of art, teaching, and ritual that outlasted most of its neighbors by a century. Caracol was the sprawling military and political machine, a city of causeways, terraces, and reservoirs that LiDAR surveys proved was a genuine metropolis hidden under the canopy. One reached you through a ferry crossing; the other through forty years of patient excavation.

Both are easy day trips from San Ignacio. Xunantunich is the accessible one: the ferry, the short climb, the friezes, and you are back in town by lunch. Caracol is the commitment, a full day down a rough road that demands a 4WD in the rainy season, but the payoff is standing on Caana with the whole green Chiquibul stretching to the horizon and, most days, almost no one else around. For current entry fees, hours, and road conditions, the Belize Tourism Board keeps up-to-date details for both sites.

Xunantunich and Caracol are not just Belize's two greatest Maya cities. They are two different answers to the same question, how a civilization rose and how it ended, and they are both still giving up secrets. A founding king in 2025, an art school in 2026. Whatever they find next will likely come from this same ridge of Cayo limestone.