Temple of the Frescoes

20.2151°N, 87.4292°W.

The Temple of the Frescoes stands at the centre of the walled precinct at Tulum, on the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Built in stages between approximately 1200 and 1450 CE during the Late Postclassic, the structure is two stories of cut limestone faced with stucco and surrounded by a low colonnaded gallery. The interior preserves some of the best-preserved Maya wall paintings on the peninsula — figures of deities including Chaac and the Diving God, rendered in blue and ochre against a black ground, depicting the cosmological framework of the Postclassic Maya. The murals were first systematically copied by Samuel Lothrop in 1924 for the Carnegie Institution, and re-photographed by INAH conservators in the 1980s as the salt-air corrosion accelerated.

The Temple of the Frescoes is a building whose interior paintings were finished within a generation of when European ships first appeared on the horizon outside its eastern wall.