Can you climb the pyramids at Teotihuacan?

This is one of the most-asked questions about Teotihuacan and the internet is still full of photographs that make it look open. Those photographs predate the current rules.

The current position

Why the steps closed

Two pressures, both straightforward.

Wear. Teotihuacan is the most visited archaeological site in Mexico. Millions of feet on 2,000-year-old stone stairways does measurable damage, and unlike a floor you cannot replace the treads. The Pyramid of the Sun is 65 metres high with a steep, uneven staircase that was never built for a queue.

Safety. Those steps are narrow, high-risered and slippery in rain, at an altitude of 2,121 metres where visitors are already more breathless than they expect. Managing a two-way flow of tens of thousands of people up and down them is a genuinely hard problem.

The pattern is not unique to Mexico. Chichén Itzá closed El Castillo years ago for the same reasons, and Uluru in Australia closed for different but related ones. Ancient monuments that used to be climbable are steadily becoming things you look at.

What you can still do, which is a lot

Do not let the ban put you off the site. Teotihuacan at ground level is enormous and most of it is open.

• Walk the Avenue of the Dead, the full two kilometres from the Ciudadela to the Pyramid of the Moon. This is the spine of the city and walking it is the single best way to feel its scale.
• The Temple of the Feathered Serpent in the Ciudadela, with its facade of carved serpent and Tláloc heads. This was deliberately buried by a later structure, which is why it survives at all.
• The palace complexes, including Quetzalpapálotl, where you can see surviving murals and carved pillars up close.
• The site museum, which is where the finds from the tunnels and burials are, and where the scale model makes the layout click.
• The plazas at the base of both pyramids, which are open and give you the buildings from below.

The hours you actually need covers how to fit that into a morning, and the pyramid add-on guide explains what the guided balloon packages include on the site.

The one way left to get height

Since the summits closed, the elevated view of Teotihuacan is only available from the air. That is not a marketing line, it is arithmetic: there is no hill inside the zone, no viewing tower, and no drone flying you are allowed to do.

Which is why the balloon flights have become the thing they are. From a kilometre up at sunrise you see the whole plan at once: the axis, the alignment of the Pyramid of the Sun with Cerro Gordo behind it, the Ciudadela at the far end. That is a view that used to require climbing 248 steps and now requires getting up at four. We compare the two ways of experiencing the site in balloon versus walking, and set out honestly what the balloon does and does not show you.

That is the whole reason these flights exist as a category rather than a novelty, and it is why the flight that includes about ninety minutes inside the archaeological zone is the version most people book: you get the view from above and the walk at ground level in the same morning.

Will it reopen?

Nothing suggests so. The trend at heavily visited heritage sites runs one way, and the conservation argument does not get weaker as visitor numbers grow. Plan for the site as it is rather than hoping.

If you have old photographs from the summit, or a relative who climbed it in the nineties, you have something that cannot be repeated. That is worth a moment on the plaza at the bottom.

Questions about climbing