Inside Chichén Itzá - 360 | National Geographic

Janeshia was an amazing city of the Maya. What we see now is the civic and religious part of it, so we can tell these buildings were sacred. El Castillo, or Temple of Kukulkan, is an amazing building based on astronomical and mathematical science. I've been leading a team of archeologists and researchers to explore the underground water system below Chichen Itza for several years.

The Great Maya Aquifer Project is a very ambitious exploration with the aims of knowing this huge amount of water that lays under the ground. The aquifer was sacred because it contained water. Water became a religious concept for them as well. Cenotes are the collapse of caverns, holes in the ground, and we see and we can access the aquifer. Cenotes were super important for the Maya because they are part of the underworld.

We have heard for a long time the oral tradition of the elders that the El Castillo was built over a cavern or cenote, but we also have scientific proof of that. What we know is that north, south, east, and west for the ancient Maya were four directions of the universe. They had a fifth direction that we don't use in our cardinal points, which is the center, the axis mundi. They believed everything was created from that center; they centered themselves in the cosmos.

We have been working very hard on trying to find an entrance to this fifth direction of the Maya universe, trying to find an underground pathway that we can dive to this cenote. What I want to achieve is much better knowledge. Not only finding amazing sites, which is, of course, a very nice part of our project, but to understand better the life of the Maya through the Great Maya Aquifer, through the caves, through everything they do underground.