Governor's Palace

20.3611°N, 89.7711°W.

The Governor's Palace at Uxmal — Spanish Casa del Gobernador — the largest single-platform palace structure in the Maya world, built between approximately 950 and 1000 CE during the late Puuc-Maya period. The structure is not a pyramid but rests on a massive pyramidal substructure 12 metres tall and 162 metres long; the palace itself is 98 metres long with 24 chambers and three vaulted entrances. The frontage is decorated with approximately 20,000 individually carved limestone mosaic elements — long-nosed Chaac (rain god) masks, geometric step-frets, woven-mat motifs, and serpent imagery — the largest surviving stone mosaic façade in pre-Columbian America. The orientation is offset from the rest of the city to align with the rising of Venus as morning star at its southerly extreme, an alignment that recurs once every eight years and is referenced explicitly in the carved hieroglyphic inscriptions on the building.

A palace on a pyramid whose exterior is a 20,000-piece stone mosaic, oriented to a planet whose 8-year cycle the builders had measured precisely enough to align the building to within a degree.