The Wildest Adventure Destination in the Americas Is Hiding Here

The makeshift crosses left for victims of fer-de-lances didn’t rattle me much. The aggressive vipers thrive in the jungles of northeastern Guatemala and sometimes lay camouflaged along the trail we were following, but I figured I could spot their vivid yellow skin if I paid attention. I didn’t worry about the swarms of ticks, which are easy to spot, or the presence of jaguars and pumas, which are not. I didn’t sweat the guttural roar of the howler monkeys, or the deafening clatter of cicadas, but I did plenty of sweating: During my trek, we experienced 90% humidity and 90-degree temperatures by midmorning.

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What really touched a nerve on the hike to El Mirador, the abandoned Mayan empire that until recently was buried under the ravenous jungle of northern Guatemala, were the spider webs. I’m 6-foot-7. Few make this journey into these wilds—“up to about 5,000 visitors a year,” many of them European backpackers, says Dr. Richard Hansen, the archaeologist who serves as director and principal investigator of the Mirador Basin Project and has been working on the site for more than three decades. I’d wager that few, if any of them, are my height. Walking behind my group of companions, I alone ended up with a face full of netting. And every time my face snagged a web strung between the sapodilla trees, I imagined a big, hairy, fist-sized creature wriggling around in my hair.

Of course, the challenges—real and conjured—of getting to El Mirador is part of what makes it so special. You can take a bus to Tikal—Guatemala’s better known but arguably over-touristed Mayan treasure—and Mexico’s Chichen Itza. You can take a train to Machu Picchu. They’re incredible, but El Mirador is the greatest monument to one of the most robust and brutal civilizations ever to walk the earth: a sprawling metropolis that covers more than 50 square miles, larger than Los Angeles. But for now, at least, to see El Mirador you have to earn it. That means a 40-mile hike stretching across two or three days, depending on how much you stop to take in the sights. The good news is that once you’re in there, you get an astounding archaeological treasure largely to yourself.

More than 20 years have passed since I trekked into the Mirador-Calakmul Basin, a subtropical rainforest made up of nearly 2,500 square miles set in the dead center of Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, a region that encompasses the Peten region of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. In the interim, a team of more than 40 archaeologists and specialists with up to 400 workmen led by Hansen has uncovered buildings, monuments, causeways, and other features of the Maya heartland in 56 ancient cities.

Over the passage of two decades, it appears, two things have remained constant. One is that it’s still an incredible journey to get there and back. The second is that although the archaeological site and the tropical rainforests around it were officially protected in 2003 as Mirador Basin National Monument, an array of outside threats remains—from narcos, ranchers, looters and loggers, and government indifference. To date, none of these factors has made the site unsafe for tourists (more on that below).

El Mirador offers up one of the last great adventures in the Western Hemisphere. The question isn’t whether you should go. The question is how soon you can get there.

Uncovering a Lost World

There’s little evidence that Richard Hansen has mellowed in the two decades since my friend John and I stumbled into his encampment, marinaded in sweat and mosquito repellent. You have to be devoted and charismatic and maybe even a little crazy and combative in a Colonel Kurtz kind of way to hang on there as long as Hansen has. He’s an affiliate research professor of anthropology at Idaho State University who earned his doctorate with highest honors at UCLA, and he’s devoted his entire life—40 years of research—to this area, in the process emerging as something of a godhead in his field. His work has been feted within his profession, and by environmental and conservation organizations globally, and even by Guatemala’s former presidents. He has sustained the effort through individual donors, NGOs, and the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies (FARES), which he runs.

When he appears on a zoom call from his office in Idaho recently, he’s as feisty as ever, describing one of his critics as “an absolute idiot.” Since my trek, he tells me, his organization has invested $23 million on the basin—some of it on year-round security, but most of it on excavation, preservation, and archaeological research.

Last year, Hansen released a new study conducted with lidar technology, an advanced type of radar that allows researchers to “peel off the jungle” and see everything underneath, he says. “So we have [a clear picture of] every single city out there.” The $1 million research project reveals a far larger and more advanced society than historians had previously contemplated. El Mirador once boasted a population of hundreds of thousands, based on experimental data and the number of contemporaneous structures. The region contains 964 ancient Maya sites forming 417 ancient cities, most of which date to the Middle and Late Preclassic periods from 1,000 B.C. to about A.D. 150. These discoveries have upended the accepted historical narrative that the mid- to late-Preclassic Mayans were nomadic hunter-gatherers who traveled around the region planting corn crops. As many as a million people once lived in this vast network of communities.

All of this yields a ridiculously exciting tourism option for adventurous travelers. Hansen said it’s now possible to embark on a weeklong trek that includes seven or eight ancient cities, with pyramids from 100 to 200 feet high. You can roam the lost cities of Tintal, Wakna, Balamnal, and Nakbe, which are among the oldest known Maya settlements, dating from around 800 to 100 BC. All of it was abandoned under mysterious circumstances almost 2,000 years ago.

In the summer of 2024 there were 19 major excavations going on, most covered by polycarbonate roofs installed to protect delicate art from ultraviolet rays and rain, with 400 field workers on site and more doing laboratory analysis. Much of the field research takes place from June through August, when regular rains provide water that would otherwise cost huge sums of money to truck in. Much of the rest of the year Hansen travels to raise money and prepare publications, which now number in the hundreds. “It’s the largest project in the history of Guatemala,” he says.

That’s not even touching on the region’s vast biodiversity: It’s home to about 200 animal species, more than 300 species of avian fauna, and 300 species of trees in six types of tropical forest. Several threatened or endangered animals here include the jaguar and four other types of cats, plus tapirs, ocelots, and rare harpy eagles. The area’s southern limestone cliffs are the last place on the planet with viable populations of the orange-breasted falcon.

Hansen’s goal? To create the first cultural and natural historical sanctuary in Latin America while maintaining the jungle wilderness. That last part—which means no roads and no airstrips—is key. It may be critical to the site surviving longer than the Mayans did.

History Brought to Life

There aren’t many places you can go where history is literally being excavacated before your eyes. The work during our visit involved the temple of the 13^th Mayan king. A giant jaguar paw adorned the outside of the temple, which has since been revealed to include nearly intact stucco masks with inscriptions.

Once you trek in, you’ll have a wide array of choices, and should plan enough time to see both the newly restored sites and the hall of fame locations. In the latter category is La Danta pyramid, which is 232 feet high, 980 feet wide, and 2,000 feet long, and covers nearly 45 acres. It’s one of the world’s largest pyramid complexes by volume. In its heyday, it’s likely that Danta was the largest monumental structure in the world. Hansen’s team calculated that it took as many as 15 million man-days of labor, with 12 men carrying each block of cut stone weighing about 1,000 pounds.

Don’t make what Hansen calls the common mistake of climbing La Danta and then forgoing a visit to the Tigre Complex, which sports its own pyramid that soars to 180 feet and covers an area six times larger than the more famous Temple IV at Tikal. Here, Hansen and his researchers discovered skeletons pierced through the ribs through the ribs with obsidian arrow points, possibly the unlucky participants in an Early Classic period battle that cleared out the last of the abandoned capital. In that same vicinity is Structure 34 or Jaguar Paw Temple, which features a stairway lined with remnants of ancient masks that may have been as much as 10 feet high. Also visible are the silhouettes of the Monos and Leon pyramids, part of the administrative complex known as the Central Acropolis, which comprise some of the oldest and largest clusters of public architecture in Mayan civilization.

Hansen points current visitors to newly restored Cascabel complex—one of the major groups of buildings on the northern side of the west complex, which he describes as having “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” architecture. The buildings are made of large blocks of limestone slathered in layers of lime stucco which was originally painted. The main buildings generally feature central stairways decorated with masks of Mayan deities. Among the treasures Hansen’s team excavated was a royal throne.

At the ancient city of Tintal, Hansen plans to uncover and piece together the magnificent Stela 1, a sculpted monument made of red sandstone that he first excavated in 1990, and again in 2014, representing an ancestral king. Analysis indicates that it weighs about ten and a half tons and the Preclassic Maya moved it from the original sandstone source at confluences of two rivers in the southern Peten—a distance of more than 68 miles without a single tow hitch.

To get to El Mirador, go to the northern hub Guatemalan city of Flores and hire a licensed local guide. Treks begin in Carmelita, the last village at the edge of the roadless region. All tours now follow a route along the ancient causeway system—about 110 miles of ancient superhighways that are up to 131 feet wide—linking major ancient cities in the basin and their satellite hubs. Hansen describes this as the world’s first freeway system, facilitating the trade of goods, labor and food. The guides will bring a team of mules carrying water, food, and camping gear; a cook will help set up and break down camp.

The trek has clearly improved over the years since my visit. Instead of the closed-in jungle I experienced, hikers will see Mayan buildings along the way. The hike itself is also about six hours shorter, although with the additional sights might take longer. “If you stop to take pictures and look at animals or snakes or orchids or fungi, you’re looking at three days,” Hansen says.

The best times of year to go are November through February, when it’s relatively cool and dry. Avoid March and April, when it’s hot, buzzing with insects, and the vegetation has lost many of its leaves.

Eventually, the trip may get far easier. Hansen has proposed the creation of a small tourist train, along with carefully managed ecotourist-type accommodations to allow for a sustainable number of visitors. This would allow the region to remain roadless and avoid overuse of mules, which would turn the trail into a dung-covered minefield and ruin the water supply. Carefully exposing El Mirador’s historical treasures to more people will help preserve it, he argues. And that’s a key element of his work—not just uncovering the astonishing history there, but making sure it lasts.

Loggers, Looters, and Cartels

Why not just build a road and let people drive in? That could lead to the demise of the site, Hansen says, because of the complex matrix of threats to the region. He opines—in language that is characteristically both eloquent and blunt—that any public use of this prized landscape other than ecotourism would be “the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump.”

But other parties who have their own aspirations for the region. Timber companies have already engaged in “excessive logging,” according to the Global Heritage Fund, and are eager to make further inroads into the basin. And the Los Angeles Times, quoting Mexican government sources, reported in 2023 that at least seven groups of illegal loggers were harvesting wood they were selling in Mexico. It’s not just that roads allow precious forest to be harvested; it’s that drug cartels are eager to have roads that would allow them to more easily move product north into Mexico.

“The loggers punch roads in to get the logs out, and the narcos love that,” Hansen says. “And in this case, since there’s so much deforestation to the west of us, they can be easily spotted by our spy satellites. So they like the idea of these jungle roads put in by the loggers, because they can move product without being so easily visible.

“Once they’re in there,” he continues, “there’ll never be another tourist ever to go to Mirador again. Ever.” He points to Laguna del Tigre National Park, on the nation’s opposite northern corner, where narcos burned large tracts of jungle to build illegal landing strips, according to former President Alejandro Giammettei. NASA’s Earth Observatory page shows “clusters of fires” in Mirador that leave parts of the landscape “stripped of the tropical forest that once covered it.” A Guatemalan army colonel pointed out to the Washington Post that the narcos have enough money to abandon million-dollar planes in the jungle. “Their resources are infinite,” he said, “and we are just trying to keep up.”

In the interim, the cartels are laundering drug money, in part with cattle. The narcos pay a villager around the Mirador region a few hundred bucks to go out and cut jungle, then plant corn. “Then they come in with guns and say, ‘Okay, get out,’ and they put cattle out there,” Hansen says. The cartel will later produce a receipt showing they sold the livestock in Mexico City, so the money goes “free and clear” into a bank, Hansen says. Meanwhile, the area is gradually shorn of jungle.

Then there are the looters. “It’s rampant,” Hansen says. He installed year-round security in 1992, which kept it mostly in check. But, he says, “Wherever I didn’t have guards, it’s been totally devastated.”

And finally, there are the big-business developers—the people who want to build resorts and other properties, open it up as a lavish travel destination. “They want to put their roads in there,” he says. “They want to put their stores in there. They want to put their hotels in there. They don’t want the idea of a wilderness area, which we’re trying to do to involve the communities.”

The struggle with these forces has made Hansen a target. He says his life has been threatened twice, in 2001 and 2020. His response has been to dig in harder and make important friends. In the spring of 2024, Cynthia Perera, the head of Latin American and Caribbean affairs for the U.S. Department of Interior, hiked into the Mirador Basin with him to explore the idea of helping to install interpretive panels to generate deeper understanding of some of the locations.

Despite the tectonic collision of various interests, Mirador has remained safe for tourists—though at times, access has been curtailed. In the summer of 2024, a group of 150 armed men pushed in Mirador from the north and began logging, Hansen says; the government sent in armed forces to flush them out and closed the area to tourists for six weeks. But visitors are generally left alone.

An Embattled Vision

Not all the assaults on the Mirador Basin project have targeted the landscape. Hansen has also found himself at the center of an organized campaign that has portrayed him as an interloper eager to enrich himself and leave local communities out in the cold. He characterizes these as misinformation campaigns—people labeling him with what he calls the “imperialist, colonialist gringo thing.”

Though he has long won widespread acclaim within his field, the idea of cultural appropriation is far more potent than in the recent past, especially if Hansen can be portrayed as a white invader seeking to profit from tourists who look like him. During the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April 2023, Hansen was answering questions when a group of 15 masked protestors rushed onstage, toppling chairs and shouting “This is stolen land!” A struggle broke out between the group and event crew. A flyer with the words “Hands off El Mirador Richard Hansen” included QR codes for more information.

Hansen says the calculated campaign began when he and his organization—in the face of growing threats to the basin—sought $72 million from Congress for security and conservation just before Covid-19. An opponent with some resources and digital savvy launched a social media blitz during the pandemic, and a petition on change.org sought to end the University of Utah’s practice of funding his project, calling out “both white supremacy and systemic racism.” The bill ultimately stalled.

Hansen, whose grandparents were Mexican and who has gone into personal debt to keep the project afloat, says he wants to work with and include local communities in Carmelita and elsewhere, and has no interest in getting rich; the Mirador basin is his life’s work. He has survived several brushes with fer-de-lances and a near-fatal plane crash that burned the only copies of his master’s thesis. He’s not about to be brushed back easily. He said his lawyers have considered suing his most virulent critics, but the man pulling the strings is a billionaire oil magnate who “will throw you into court and suck you dry before you can do anything.”

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Questions linger, though. Jeff Abbott, a Guatemala-based American journalist, has written about the concerns of the communities living alongside the wilderness. “They have the right to utilize the resources of the forest,” he says, “and they’ve built their own tourism—and they do trekking and all that.”

How well Hansen’s plan would work remains to be seen. “It’s remote, and Guatemala doesn’t have complete control of that territory,” Abbott says. Getting input from locals on the questions surrounding El Mirador has been harder; I emailed a list of questions to Guatemalan officials from the Wildlife Conservation Society in the region, including Program Director Gabriela Ponce Santizo, and despite indications they would reply, they never did so. Efforts to reach other prominent conservation and archaeological figures in the region were also unsuccessful.

Is Hansen’s vision viable? It’s not clear, but it seems he has as much of a chance of anyone of winning the argument to keep the place wild and roadless. “Hansen pulls a lot of influence here,” Abbott says, “and in the States.”

A Golden World Unfurled

On one of my last evenings there, John and I and our travel companions clambered up loose rock and dirt using a fixed rope to summit La Danta, hoping to catch a sunset from above the canopy. The cloud cover was dense, and it didn’t seem hopeful. But as the light grew dimmer, a keyhole opened in the cumulonimbi and a beam of golden light poured through, and the former glory of the Mayan world unfurled around us as a lumpy green carpet. We knew that every undulation was part of the empire that had been buried under the landscape, and that much of what was yet to be revealed would likely be astonishing in its historical sweep.

To this point, the jungle has been undefeated, but the opportunity now exists to get a pretty detailed look at the remains of one of the planet’s greatest early civilizations.

The feeling settled over me of being in a place that felt unfathomably remote—it took a couple of flights, a 40-mile trek, and this last, skittery scramble atop of this historic landmark to reach this spot. Yet we were less than 1,300 miles from the Texas border. To be this close to home and get a chance to see this? It was worth every drop of sweat, blood, and fears.

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El Mirador: What to Know if You Go

Given the distances involved, it should go without saying that anyone trekking into El Mirador should be reasonably fit.

Getting There: From Guatemala City, the Colombian airline Avianca runs regular, quick flights to Mundo Maya International Airport in Flores. From there, outfitters provide transportation to Carmelita, the site of the trailhead to El Mirador.

Find a Guide: There are numerous operators in Flores, but you can book in advance—and with a local outfitter—with the Carmelita Cooperative. The operator runs 5- and 6-day El Mirador trips focused on sustainability and ensuring that the community participates in and profits from tourism.

What to Bring: Comfortable hiking shoes that you’ve fully broken in are an absolute necessity. You’ll also want light clothing that covers your limbs. to protect against insects, plus a hat and sunscreen. Most guides provide water but it’s wise to bring some of your own. Your outfitter may advise you to bring other supplies, like toilet paper, but there are plenty of stores in Flores for gearing up. Make sure you remember a way to keep your camera charged. There’s much you’ll want to photograph.

Where to Stay: For a splurge, check out the spectacular Las Lagunas Boutique Hotel in Flores, a five-star ecolodge. Flores is also home to many budget-friendly hotels for under $100 a night, such as the Hotel Petén and Petén Esplendido Hotel and Conference Center.