A troop of brightly dressed Los Olmecas Ototonacos de Veracruz Native Americans perform ceremonial twirling dances while hanging upside-down from a huge flagpole. (Nothing to do with Tulum or the Maya, but entertaining and worth the US $1 tip they ask for.) A word of caution if you're driving a car: The parking lot has odd-angled stone walls that, if you're not careful, can scrape the body as you maneuver.
The Maya site may have been formerly also known by the name Zama, meaning city of Dawn. Tulúm is also the Yucatec Mayan word for fence or wall[ (or trench), and the walls surrounding the site allowed the Tulum fort to serve as a defense against an invasion. From the numerous depictions in murals and other works around the site, Tulum appears to have been an important site for the worship of the Diving or Descending God
Tulum is not a particularly important city to archeologists.
A Late Post- Classic city, the style of architecture is nowhere near the complexity of the Classic period. By that time in history the building arts and stone cutting skills of the Maya had degraded and much use was made of heavy stucco to cover any rough spots. But what Tulum lacks in architectural style it more than makes up for in location. It is now the most visited archeological site in all of Mexico, with busloads of tourists coming from Cancún and cruise ships docked at Cozumel or Playa. Even its first tourist, John Lloyd Stephens, American author and adventurer who toured the Yucat n in the early 1840s, was impressed: 'Besides the deep and exciting interest of the ruins themselves, we had around us what we wanted at all the other places, the magnificence of nature.... We had found this one of the most interesting places we had seen in our whole exploration of ruins.'
