Pyramid of the Magician

20.3603°N, 89.7717°W.

The Pyramid of the Magician at Uxmal, Yucatán, Mexico, the central pyramid of the Puuc-style Maya city built between approximately 700 CE and 1000 CE. Original base 70 by 49 metres on an unusual oval-rounded plan — the only major Maya pyramid built with an elliptical rather than rectangular footprint. Original height 35 metres on five superimposed temples, each phase built over and partially burying the previous, producing an internal layered sequence visible in section. The west staircase faces toward the setting sun on the summer solstice; the east staircase faces toward Venus's heliacal rise as morning star at intervals corresponding to the planet's 8-year cycle. Local Yucatec Maya legend recorded by John Lloyd Stephens in 1841 attributes the pyramid's construction to a dwarf magician who built it in a single night — the source of the colonial Spanish name.

A pyramid built on an oval footprint by a civilisation that built every other pyramid square, with five temples stacked inside it, in a city named for its central monument by a story Stephens wrote down from a 19th-century Maya farmer.