Coba Archeological Site, Mexico

Coba lies inland in Quintana Roo, spread around a group of shallow lakes in dense jungle, and it is one of the few Maya cities still known by something close to its original name. It was never a single compact precinct. Thousands of structures are scattered across many square kilometres, linked by raised limestone causeways called sacbeob, the white roads. Coba built more of them than any other Maya centre, and the longest runs roughly a hundred kilometres west to Yaxuna, the greatest road the Maya ever made. At the heart of the site stands Nohoch Mul, the great mound, rising about forty two metres and the tallest structure in the northern Yucatan.

Settlement began here around the first century, and by the Late Classic, between roughly 600 and 900, Coba was a power controlling a wide territory, with a population estimated in the tens of thousands. Its authority faded as Chichen Itza rose, and by around 1000 the roads and the great plazas had lost their purpose, though building of a smaller kind carried on for centuries afterwards. By the time the Spanish reached the peninsula in the sixteenth century, the jungle had taken it. Most of Coba is still unexcavated.