History - Playa Del Carmen

The peninsula's modern boom is, in fact, a reawakening, for this has been the longest continuously civilized part of the country, with evidence of Maya inhabitants as early as 2500 BC, producing pottery and living in huts virtually identical to those you see in the villages today. The Maya are not a specifically Mexican culture - their greatest cities, indeed, were not in Mexico at all but in the lowlands of modern Guatemala, Belize and Honduras - but they did produce a unique style in the Yucatán and continued to flourish here long after the collapse of the "Classic" civilizations to the south. This they did in spite of natural handicaps - thin soil, heat, humidity and lack of water - and in the face of frequent invasion from central Mexico. And here the Maya peasantry still live, remarkably true to their old traditions and lifestyle, despite the hardships of the intervening years: ravaged by European diseases and forced to work on vast colonial encomiendas , or later, through the semi-slavery of debt peonage, on the henequen plantations or in the forests, hauling timber.

The florescence of Maya culture, throughout their extensive domains, came in the Classic period from around 300 to 900 AD: an age in which the cities grew up and Maya science and art apparently reached their height. The Maya calendar, a complex interaction of solar, lunar, astronomical and religious dates, was far more complicated and accurate than the Gregorian one, and they also developed a sophisticated mathematical and (still largely undeciphered) hieroglyphic system and perspective in art 500 or so years before Renaissance Europe. In the early ninth century AD, growing military tensions and a prolonged drought saw the abandonment of many of the southern lowland cities (Tikal and Calakmul among them), while the cities of the northern lowlands - such as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal and the Puuc sites - began to flourish. These in turn collapsed about 1200 AD, to be succeeded by Mayapán and a confederacy of other cities that probably included Tulum and Cozumel. By the time the Spanish arrived, Mayapán's power, too, had been broken by revolt, and the Maya had splintered into tribalism - although still with coastal cities and long-distance sea trade that awed the conquistadors. It proved the hardest area of the country to pacify. Despite attempts to destroy all trace of the ancient culture, there was constant armed rebellion against the Spanish and later the Mexican authorities - the last, the Caste Wars of the nineteenth century, during which the Maya, supplied with arms from British Honduras (Belize), gained brief control of the entire peninsula. Gradually, though, they were again pushed back into the wastes of southern Quintana Roo, where the final pockets of resistance held out until the beginning of the twentieth century.