Teotihuacán, the city of the gods
The account
A planned metropolis with pyramids aligned to the stars, built by a people whose name no one knows: a legacy of visitors from the sky.
What investigators found
It was one of the largest cities of the ancient world, with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Who built it is still debated, but excavations reveal an organized Mesoamerican people.
The story
About 50 kilometers from Mexico City lie the ruins of Teotihuacán, with the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the long Avenue of the Dead. Around the year 450, the city had more than 100,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest on the planet at the time.
The name comes from the Aztecs, who found the city already abandoned centuries later and called it "the place where men become gods." No one knows what its builders called themselves. In 2003, archaeologists found a tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where they later even discovered liquid mercury. To some, the alignment of the pyramids with the stars points to knowledge from elsewhere. To researchers, it is the signature of a society that watched the sky with enormous care.