One of the strangest things about **Chichén Itzá** is that one of the largest cities in the northern Yucatán developed in a landscape with almost no permanent surface rivers.

The short answer is that Chichén Itzá was built around **cenotes, roads, and long-distance connections** rather than a river system.

Its location gave the city access to reliable groundwater. Its **sacbeob**, or raised Maya roads, connected it to the surrounding region. Chichén Itzá also participated in much larger political and commercial networks linking places such as **Cobá, Yaxuná, Ek Balam, the Puuc region, Isla Cerritos, and the Caribbean coast**.

That is one reason I think it is misleading to understand Chichén Itzá simply as “the Maya city with El Castillo.”

El Castillo is the monument everyone photographs.

The more interesting question is how the city around it actually worked.

For the past few months I have been working through that question, and the result went live on Kindle today:

**CHICHÉN ITZÁ: A City Built Between Wells and Worlds**  
by Small Sugar

The book follows several questions that kept appearing as I worked through the archaeology and inscriptions:

Why are there almost no rivers in northern Yucatán, and how did Maya cities obtain enough water?

What connected **Chichén Itzá, Cobá and Yaxuná**?

Who was **K’ak’upakal**, one of the most frequently named figures in Chichén Itzá's ninth-century inscriptions?

Why does the architecture around the **Great Terrace, Temple of the Warriors and Thousand Columns** look so different from earlier parts of the city?

How useful is the old idea that “Toltecs conquered Chichén Itzá”?

What was the **Sacred Cenote** actually used for?

What do the **Great Ball Court, El Caracol, Las Monjas, Akab Dzib and the Initial Series Group** tell us when we stop treating them as isolated tourist attractions?

And perhaps the biggest question:

**Did Chichén Itzá really “collapse” around AD 900?**

Not in the simple sense.

Major political and architectural changes took place, but the history of Chichén Itzá continued well beyond the end of its most famous monumental phase. Understanding that later history also means looking beyond Chichén Itzá itself, toward **Mayapán and the changing political geography of northern Yucatán**.

That is the part I found most interesting while writing the book. Chichén Itzá makes much more sense once it stops being a collection of ruins and becomes a city connected to water sources, roads, ports, neighboring cities and several centuries of political change.

I also ended up adding two maps: one of northern Yucatán showing the regional connections, and another of the archaeological site itself. Without them, relationships such as **Chichén Itzá–Yaxuná–Cobá** or **Chichén Itzá–Isla Cerritos** are unnecessarily difficult to visualize.

For people who have actually visited Chichén Itzá:

**What part of the site did you understand least while you were standing there?**

El Castillo?  
The Sacred Cenote?  
The Great Ball Court?  
The Temple of the Warriors?  
The older southern group?

I'd like to turn some of those questions into separate discussions here.

Why did Chichén Itzá become so powerful without rivers — and what actually happened to the city after AD 900?