Photo: Dennis G. Jarvis (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A self-guided driving tour of the Ruta Puuc, four Maya towns in the Puuc Hills south of Uxmal. You drive between the sites and walk each one. At Kabah: the arch where the raised road to Uxmal, eighteen kilometres north, began; the Codz Poop, whose west façade is 161 long-nosed masks assembled from about 5,400 separately worked stones; the Great Pyramid and the Yaxkán Quadrangle. Two stops cover the country itself: the Puuc Hills, where there are no rivers and the water table lies too deep to reach, and the chultunes, the bell-shaped cisterns cut into the bedrock to hold rainwater. At Sayil: the Great Palace, about 85 metres long, El Mirador and its open roof comb, and Stela 9. Then the Palace of Xlapak and its stacked Chaac masks, and at Labná the Palace, the decorated vaulted Arch, El Mirador and the Building of the Columns. Most of what you see dates from about AD 700 to 950. In 1996 Kabah, Sayil and Labná were included with Uxmal in a single UNESCO World Heritage property.
14 narrations, yours to keep — no subscription, no expiry. Works offline once downloaded, and if it isn’t for you we’ll refund it.
Going somewhere with no signal? Put the guide on your home screen first, then download it from that icon while you are on wi-fi — that way you download once, and it works in airplane mode with no roaming charges. Show me the order →
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 · 31 features in this old town (the field-surveyed mapping database behind Apple Maps), Wikidata · 4 cross-referenced entries (peer-reviewed structured records), the heritage authority below, and the primary historical texts where they exist.
Cross-referenced against Modern excavation publications · academic peer-review.
Every sentence is checked against those sources before it is recorded. If a claim can't be traced, it doesn't make the audio.
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.
Arch of Kabah, Codz Poop (Palace of the Masks), Great Pyramid of Kabah, Yaxkán Quadrangle.
El Mirador of Sayil, Great Palace of Sayil, Stela 9 of Sayil.
Arch of Labná, Building of the Columns (Labná), El Mirador of Labná, Palace of Labná, Palace of Xlapak, Chultunes: Water in the Puuc Hills, The Puuc Hills.
The gateway where the raised road to Uxmal began, with faded red handprints in the plaster of its passage.
A west façade of 161 long-nosed masks, read as Chaak the rain god or, in INAH's recent work, as Witz, the sacred mountain.
About 85 metres long on terraced platforms, with the Descending God and a large carved Chaac face on its second storey.
Bell-shaped cisterns cut into the limestone, fed by gently sloping stuccoed platforms, in hills with no surface water.
A nine-room palace with a plain lower wall and stacked Chaac masks over its central doorway.
A decorated vaulted passage with miniature Maya thatched houses carved in limestone above two niches.
Tap "Start Walking Tour" and allow location access. The map shows all 14 narration points.
Follow the suggested route or explore freely. GPS tracks your position. Reach a site and the narration plays automatically.
Each site has its own narration. 14 narration points.
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.
Every narrated point in Ruta Puuc — Kabah, Sayil, Xlapak and Labná, each with its own narration.
Spend an hour or a full day. Skip sites, revisit favourites, take breaks. The tour adapts to you.
14 narration points, including Arch of Kabah, Yaxkán Quadrangle, Great Pyramid of Kabah, Codz Poop (Palace of the Masks) and El Mirador of Sayil. That is about 18 minutes of narration in all, and you walk between the stops at your own pace.
Yes. It plays in your phone’s browser as you walk: no guide, no group, no app to install and no fixed start time.
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 ~4 hours with the drives total, but you walk at your own pace. 14 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.