This archeological site around 1km2 has pyramids,palaces and ball game courts, but it is speculated that there is a great part of the site that is still to be found. The best known of the existing complex is the Pyramid of the Niches which has 365 niches which archaeologists consider to be a representation of the calendar. It was built slowly filling an open space.
It is probable that the building ceremonies of Tajin began in the first century, in the early classic mesoameriocan period it shows influence from Teotihuacan, while in the post-classic Toltec influence is to be seen. This pre-colombian archaelogical zone is near the city of Papantla,whose meaning is city or place of thunder, hurricane or lightning in the Toltec language.
Destroyed by Chichimeca invaders,one of the few people who did not continue the building of the temples, El Tajin’s reconstruction was undertaken in the thirteenth century. The city had been abandoned when the Spanish conquerors arrived in the sixteenth century.
El Tajin was the most important mesoamerican city on the Gulf of Mexico,because it controlled the commercial, religious and political interchange in a region apparently built and inhabited by the Totonacs. The city was mysteriously abandoned in the the year 1150 AD after nearly three hundred years of splendour.
Nowadays, the center of the old city, which has an extension of more than 10Km2, can be visited. The Tontonacs paid homage to Quetzalcoatl-Sol, The Plumed Serpent, upon which are based the majority of their beliefs, in the freizes of the ball game courts, paintings and sculptures to The Plumed Serpent are found. 15 have been discovered so far.
One of the most famous buildings is The Pyramid of the Niches. The structure has seven bodies with vaulted cornices and freizes of niches that lend energy to its architecture .
The main building has 365 niches which correspond to the solar calendar, as well as the southern and central ball game courts and the complex of columns.
The pre-hispanic city occupies around 1221 hectares,and on entering the archaeological zone, surrounded by beautiful jungle, the aroma of exotic plants and the abundant tropical vegetation makes one feel that you are in a cultural paradise. It is located in the Totonac pan region in the northern zone of the State of Veracruz.
It is an important religious and political center in the region of the Gulf that was founded in the fourth century AD and reached its zenith between the eighth and twelth centuries AD. The center of the archaeological site is divided in five parts.
The Playa del Arroyo Group
The Central Zone
The Great Xicalcoliuhqui
The Small Tajin
The Complex of Columns
These zones within Tajin comprised at their time diverse public squares with buildings of impressive architecture like the Pyramid of the Niches.
The city maintained itself by agriculture,commerce and the exchange of goods and services with the people that lived around it. Because it was the political center of the zone and as seat of Government had the 13 rabbit who was the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, God to whom the Totonacs, inhabitants of Tajin venerated.
In Tajin there were rituals to the sun and the fertility of the earth acted out on a great post (massive jungle tree trunk), where the leader of the center danced while staring at the four cardinal points and later four flyers descended turning 13 times until they reached the ground, symbolising in this way the warmth that the sun produces on reaching the earth.
