Photo: Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Walk a Maya city that absorbed Toltec design from a thousand miles away. El Castillo aligned for the equinox serpent. The Sacred Cenote where the rain god received human sacrifices. The Great Ball Court whose acoustics carry a whisper from end to end. Grounded in the colonial Relación of Friar Diego de Landa (1566) and the modern excavation work of INAH.
29 narrations, yours to keep — no subscription, no expiry. Works offline once downloaded, and if it isn’t for you we’ll refund it.
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Every claim in this tour traces back to a named source — excavation records, the heritage authority for the site, and the primary texts themselves. Nothing is copied from other guidebooks, and anything we can't source doesn't make the recording.
Each stop is built from OpenStreetMap · 27 features in this old town (the field-surveyed mapping database behind Apple Maps), Wikidata · 1 cross-referenced entries (peer-reviewed structured records), the heritage authority below, and the primary historical texts where they exist.
Cross-referenced against Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) · Mexican federal archaeological authority.
Every sentence is checked against those sources before it is recorded. If a claim can't be traced, it doesn't make the audio.
The major stops trace back to specific passages in Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, cited stop by stop.
Every tour is reviewed by a person before it goes on sale. Stop selection, the route and anything ambiguous come back to the editor for a decision, and those questions routinely send a stop back for another accuracy pass. Nothing publishes on a machine’s say-so.
Spot anything inaccurate? Email [email protected] — fixed in the next pass.
The ceremonial heart — El Castillo dominating the central plaza, the Temple of the Warriors with its forest of columns, the Great Ball Court (the largest in Mesoamerica), the Sacred Cenote, the Tzompantli skull-rack platform.
The Osario pyramid and platforms, the Steam Bath, the Hieroglyphic Lintel Building, and the Xtoloc Cenote. The transitional zone between the ceremonial north and the older buildings to the south.
The earlier buildings in the puuc style — the Nunnery (Las Monjas) and its annex, Akab Dzib with its mysterious glyph-carved lintel, the Caracol observatory aligned for Venus, the Red House, and the small ball court of the Red House.
Twice a year on the equinoxes, the shadow of the northwestern stair casts a serpent of light against the pyramid that connects to the carved serpent head at the base. The Maya astronomical engineering still works. Climbing has been closed since 2006 — exterior view only.
Two parallel walls 145 metres apart with stone scoring rings 6 metres up. A whisper from one end carries the full length. The friezes show ballplayers being decapitated — losers, or winners, depending on which scholar you read.
A natural sinkhole 60 metres across, the destination of the sacbé processional causeway from El Castillo. Dredging recovered jade, gold, copal incense, and the bones of human sacrifices — predominantly young men, not the virgins of the colonial-era myth.
Walk along the open colonnades of the adjacent Group of the Thousand Columns. The temple itself has the famous Chac-Mool figure at the top step — closed to climbers — and the same plumed-serpent columns that mirror Tula, a thousand miles to the west.
A circular tower on a stepped platform. Window slits inside the upper chamber align with the northern and southern extremes of Venus, the equinoxes, and the spring sunset. The Maya tracked Venus for ritual and warfare timing.
The Spanish friars named the Nunnery complex for its resemblance to a convent. Akab Dzib (Dark Writing) is named for a mysterious carved lintel whose glyphs remain undeciphered. The earliest visible buildings on site — older than the Toltec-influenced north.
Tap "Start Walking Tour" and allow location access. The map shows all 28 narration points.
Follow the suggested route or explore freely. GPS tracks your position. Reach a site and the narration plays automatically.
Each narration connects what you can see today to Friar Diego de Landa's 1566 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (the earliest European account of the site), to Alfred Tozzer's 1941 Harvard edition of Landa, and to the modern INAH excavation reports.
Narrations play when you reach each site. No buttons, no track numbers. Walk naturally — the stories find you.
Premium narration that sounds like a documentary. Warm and knowledgeable, not a textbook reading.
Every narration is drafted, cross-checked against primary sources, then passed through a second editorial pass that strips unsupported claims. Dates, names, and citations verified.
See all narration points on the map. Tap any point to hear it early or replay it later.
From the equinox serpent of El Castillo to the dredged offerings of the Sacred Cenote to the Venus alignments of the Caracol. Major monuments get deep dives. Platforms, smaller temples, and Old Chichén buildings get concise narrations.
Spend an hour or a full day. Skip sites, revisit favourites, take breaks. The tour adapts to you.
Three ways, all built in:
The map-tap option means you can stand anywhere — even at home before you travel — and play any narration. GPS just makes it hands-free while you’re actually walking the site.
No. Use the “Download for offline” button before you go, and the entire tour — audio, maps, narration text — works without any data connection. Tap-to-play and the map both work fully offline. GPS itself doesn’t need data; only the download does.
Add the icon first, then download from the icon. On iPhone a guide downloaded in Safari cannot be seen by the home screen icon, so downloading first means downloading the whole thing twice.
Putting it on your home screen — iPhone or iPad (Safari):
On Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu at the top right, tap Add to Home screen (some phones say Install app), then confirm. On Android either order works.
If you opened this link from inside Instagram, Facebook or Gmail, you are in that app’s built-in browser. It cannot add anything to your home screen, and a guide downloaded there is thrown away when the app closes. Open the link in Safari or Chrome first.
Two backstops. First, the map shows every site — just tap the marker for the place in front of you. Second, you can manually queue any narration even when GPS is off. The platform never assumes GPS works; it’s the convenience layer, not the gate.
The audio runs ~2-3 hours audio total, but you walk at your own pace. 28 narration points across the site. Most visitors take 2–4 hours; some spread it over multiple visits. Once you buy it, it’s yours — there’s no expiry and no subscription. Come back next year if you like; the link in your receipt always works.
One purchase covers one device session. Most couples share earbuds and use a single phone — the audio is paced for that. If you want everyone listening on their own device, each person needs their own purchase. We do not gate sharing aggressively; we trust visitors to do the right thing.
Full refund if you never trigger a single narration on-site. Partial refund based on how far you got. See the refund policy for specifics.
The colonial-period anchor is Fray Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1566) — the Franciscan friar's account of Maya practice, written shortly after the Spanish conquest. Despite Landa's role in destroying the Maya codices, his manuscript preserved the only Spanish-era description of Chichén Itzá's monuments and the rituals associated with them. The standard modern edition is Alfred Tozzer's 1941 annotated translation (Peabody Museum, Harvard). For everything Landa did not see or describe — the iconographic programmes, the Venus tables of the Caracol, the equinox alignment of El Castillo, the cenote offerings — the narration draws on the modern excavation reports of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), which has overseen archaeology at the site since the early 20th century.