Palace of Six Patios

16.9567°N, 96.4325°W.

The Palace of Six Patios at Yagul in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, is a sprawling Late Postclassic palatial complex built between approximately 1200 and 1521 CE under the Zapotec elite who reoccupied this hilltop after the abandonment of nearby Mitla. The palace covers more than 1,500 square metres and is organized around six interconnecting interior patios, each surrounded by colonnaded chambers — an extremely unusual residential plan in Mesoamerican architecture. The building is faced with cut stone and decorated with the same greca mosaic fretwork panels that characterize Mitla, in motifs assembled from individually cut stone pieces. The site sits on a defensible hilltop above the Tlacolula Valley and was first systematically excavated by Ignacio Bernal and the University of the Americas in 1954.

The Palace of Six Patios is a building organized around six separate inner courtyards, each of which the people who lived there could enter from the others without going outside.