El Castillo

17.0894°N, 89.1417°W.

El Castillo at Xunantunich rises 40 metres above the Mopan River valley in western Belize and is the second-tallest building in the country. Built between approximately 600 and 900 CE during the Late Classic, the pyramid carries an elaborate stucco frieze on its eastern and western façades — a band of celestial imagery, kings, and astronomical glyphs running horizontally across the upper terraces. The eastern frieze was excavated by J. Eric Thompson in 1924 and consolidated in the 1990s; the western frieze remained intact under fill until exposure by the Xunantunich Archaeological Project under Richard Leventhal and Wendy Ashmore. A royal tomb containing the remains of an unidentified ruler was discovered inside the pyramid in 2016 by Jaime Awe's Belize Institute of Archaeology team. The site's modern Maya name means "Stone Maiden" in Yucatec, after a legend of a ghostly woman seen on the upper terrace.

El Castillo is a pyramid whose builders left a comic-strip of their cosmology in stucco around its waist, then buried half of it themselves.