Cañada de la Virgen

Among the treasures of our travels is learning of people and events about which we previously knew nothing.

Today we took a highly rated tour offered by Dr. Albert Coffee and learned of ancient people and their incredible understanding of the movement of the moon, sun and stars.

Coffee, a native son of Louisiana, has lived the past 15+ years in Mexico. An archeologist by training, Coffee worked on the excavation of the site's structures, known as Cañada de la Virgen, that were built by the Otomi and other people more 1,500 years ago.  Coffee’s academic training, hands-on dig experiences and a desire to share his passion were quite evident in this guided tour.

The land on which the structures are located was occupied by native people from 540 and 1050 A.D.  Generation after generation built and added to the stone structures that served as ceremonial spaces, elite residences, burial grounds and time-keeping instruments that are aligned precisely to the movements of the celestial bodies. This last function of the pyramid was the most eye opening of our tour.  

Getting to the Site

Getting to the site was a bit a journey in itself.  Coffee provided van service for the 30 minute ride out of town. As we traveled Coffee explained that the ancient structures that were claimed by the Mexican government as part of its national heritage are surrounded by private hacienda property.The hacienda owners were not keen to surrender the pyramids and structures to the Mexican government since they considered the structures part of their own private sacred space. Thus, there are some bureaucratic difficulties included in gaining access to the structures.  

A long walk (instead of driving), for example, is required up an increasingly steep cobblestone road to reach the central pyramid and other structures. There is an upside to these restrictions, in that development of hotels, restaurants and roadside vendors are not allowed, leaving the landscape in its natural state.

We added an optional lunch and lecture after the Coffee tour by Dr. Rosanna Quiroz Enis, an astronomer who has studied the pyramid for years. We recommend this lunch/lecture option to get a full appreciation of the ingenuity of the engineering of the stone structures.

Things We Leaned

The Otomi people and others that followed were sky watchers. They clearly saw that stars remained fixed in relationship to each other, but other heavenly bodies moved about. The sun and moon clearly had set rising and setting times and locations on the horizons. They also saw other bright objects visible to the naked eye, including Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, dancing in the sky.  We learned that much of their religious devotion based on blood-letting was designed to maintain this motion of heavenly bodies. 

It appears the movement of the moon through the course of a year was the main focus of the design of the central pyramid.  

The moon is visible at specific times in its cycle on the various steps of the pyramid structure. This alignment is not accidental. In addition, the pyramid is intentionally not symmetrical, allowing the moon to move up the left hand steps in 20 day increments, cross the top structure in a precisely calculated time and then descend the right steps in five day increments. How such understanding and how this engineering was achieved is lost to time.

As Dr. Rosanna Quiroz Enis informed us, "The pyramid told me what they knew."

It is clear that ancient, pre-Google people acquired a sense of the world and the universe beyond themselves.