Santa Rita Maya Ruins

A small but historically major Maya site on the edge of town, the likely ancient city of Chactemal

Santa Rita is the most accessible Maya ruin in the country — a 20-minute walk from central Corozal, on a low rise above the bay. What you see today is mostly a single restored pyramid (Structure 7), about 15 metres high, with a small modern visitor centre and a couple of unexcavated mounds in the surrounding scrub. The site stretches under much of modern Corozal, but the rest has been built over.

The reason to come is less the architecture than the history: Santa Rita was a powerful trading city that survived the collapse of the Classic Maya and remained active into the Spanish conquest period. The famous murals discovered here in the 1890s — early postclassic frescoes in the Mixteca-Puebla style — have long since faded, but reproductions are displayed in the visitor centre.

A small admission fee is charged at the gate. Allow forty-five minutes for the climb and the views over Corozal Bay from the top of the pyramid.

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A story
Santa Rita is thought to be the ancient Maya city of Chactemal — the predecessor and namesake of modern Chetumal — and one of the longest continuously inhabited Maya sites known, with traces of occupation stretching across more than 2,000 years. It was the seat of the Maya lord Nachan Can in the 1530s and was the base from which Gonzalo Guerrero — the shipwrecked Spaniard who married into Maya nobility and led their resistance to the Spanish conquest — fought against his own countrymen.