El Caracol — Attraction in Yucatán

The El Caracol or Observatory is the ruin of a building south of the Great Pyramid. These guys who built this piece knew exactly what they were doing. It is constructed at the same time that people in Europe still believed that the earth was flat as a pancake.

The construction is aimed at 27.5 degrees north of west which is not in line with the other buildings on the site but an almost perfect direction for Venus northernmost position in the sky.

In addition, a diagonal formed by the northeast and southwest corners of the building is in line with both sunrise at summer solstice and sunset at...

This round structure inside Chichen Itza was an observatory. It is named “El Caracol” (“the Snail”) because it has a spiral staircase inside. It is believed that the building dates to 906 AD. Part of the Observatory’s platform and a portion of the tower resting on El Caracol has been lost, but it is believed that Mayans used this to observe Venus and many other astronomical events important to them. This is a major structure and is definitely worth...

El Caracol is a spectacular example of Mayan engineering, science and spacial understanding of our solar system, our planet and its neighbors. The civilization that incorporated the use of zero as did the Cambodians, Indians (of India) Arabs, and finally the Europeans starting in the 13th century. That led to the European scientific revolution of the...