Palenque

The name Palenque is Spanish for a fence of wooden stakes, a translation of the Ch'ol word Otulún, "fortified place". The friar Pedro Lorenzo founded the town in 1567 to gather Ch'ol families scattered through the forest, and in 1573 it received three bells as a sign of its founding; one still hangs in the parish church. The Spanish did not know about the ancient city a few kilometres away, which the town named almost two centuries before the ruins were found. Father Antonio Solís came upon them in 1740, and from then on the ruins shaped the town's fortunes.

From 1768 it belonged to the alcaldía mayor of Ciudad Real, today's San Cristóbal, and it was declared a town in 1813. A road to Bachajón was built in 1821, and in the 1880s a railway linked the area with the Gulf of Mexico through the Pakalná station. An airfield opened in 1931, and in 1972 the state government declared Palenque a city. Excavations at the ruins from 1949 to 1952 led to the discovery of Pakal's tomb, the site museum opened in 1958, and the national park around the ruins was created in 1981.

Tourism has grown ever since. The main road was paved in 1990, a new airport opened in 2014, and in 2015 the town was named a Pueblo Mágico. On 1 January 2024 the Tren Maya opened its Palenque station, on the grounds of the old airport, as the western end of a railway around the Yucatán Peninsula.

Palenque sits in the Ch'ol Maya country of northern Chiapas, and about 40 per cent of the municipality's people are Indigenous, most of them Ch'ol, and just over a fifth of the Indigenous residents do not speak Spanish. Religion is more mixed than in the state as a whole: around half the population is Catholic, with a large Protestant and Evangelical minority and many who profess no religion.

The main religious feasts are those of Saint Dominic, the patron of the parish, and Francis of Assisi, and each year the town stages a passion play in which a young man of the area is chosen to play Jesus, following the Stations of the Cross from the church of Santo Domingo. In April the municipality holds the Festival Mundo Maya, on the culture, folklore, crafts, food and dress of the Indigenous peoples descended from the Maya, with participants from Tabasco, Yucatán, Campeche and parts of Puebla.

The ruins dominate the town's identity and its calendar, with crowds arriving for Holy Week and the spring equinox. The forest is close: howler monkeys, driven by deforestation, sometimes wander into town in search of food.

The municipality had about 132,000 people at the 2020 census; the town itself had about 43,000 in 2010, and it is the only urban area in a municipality of several hundred rural communities. Palenque is described as the poorest major city in Chiapas, and much of the surrounding population is economically marginalised. Housing reflects it: in 2005 more than a third of the municipality's homes had dirt floors, and only about three-quarters had running water. The population has grown fast, at more than 3 per cent a year around 2000.

About half the municipality's working people are in farming and livestock, many of them unpaid, and about a third in commerce and services, including tourism. The municipality has some 67 hotels with nearly 2,000 rooms, almost all of them in the town, and many families depend on the flow of visitors to the ruins.

Deforestation has had dramatic effects on the local environment, and many forest areas in the municipality have been devastated, though rainforest still surrounds the town.

Palenque eats the food of lowland Chiapas. Pozol, a cold drink of ground maize, often mixed with cacao, is drunk through the day in the lowlands, and tamales come in many forms, among them tamales de chipilín, flavoured with a local green herb. Cacao grows in the lowlands, and chocolate drinks such as tascalate, made with ground maize, cacao and achiote, are common across the state. Chiapas dishes such as cochito horneado, pork baked in a spiced adobo of chillies and vinegar, and queso de bola, the round cheese made in nearby Ocosingo, appear on menus here as across the state.

The town's eating is informal, in markets, comedores and the restaurants of the centre. The streets around the Parque Central fill in the evening with bars serving beer and micheladas — beer mixed with a spicy chilli blend.

Near the ruins, the restaurants of El Panchán and the hotels along the road cater largely to travellers, with pizza, vegetarian dishes and international food alongside Mexican plates, often with live music in the evening.