When the Aztecs came across Teotihuacan, centuries after it had been abandoned, they thought it must have been built by gods and named it the place where the gods were made. The city had reached its peak between about the first and sixth centuries, with perhaps well over a hundred thousand people, a grid of streets, apartment compounds and some of the largest pyramids in the Americas. The Pyramid of the Sun is a huge stepped mass, and the Pyramid of the Moon sits at the far end of the Avenue of the Dead, a long, broad processional road that makes the city feel grand even now.
The people who built Teotihuacan left no readable writing, so much is uncertain, including who they were and why the city declined. What survives are the murals, painted in red and green in the apartment compounds, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the obsidian tools, traded across Mesoamerica. The site was listed by UNESCO in 1987, and the neighbouring region has another wonder, the sixteenth-century aqueduct of Padre Tembleque, which ran for more than forty kilometres with tall arches to bring water to the area.
The riding around is easy to reach but not especially exciting, because the highway from Mexico City is a busy toll road, and the area around the pyramids is flat, dry and open. The interest is in the early morning, when you can arrive as the gates open and walk the avenue before crowds and heat build up. The site is at around 2,300 metres and can be cold at dawn and sunny at midday, with thunderstorms common on summer afternoons. A hat and water are essential, as there is almost no shade.
San Martín de las Pirámides, close by, has fuel, cafes and restaurants serving barbacoa, lamb cooked in an underground pit, which is a Sunday tradition in this region. Local shops sell obsidian souvenirs, and some produce pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey plant. Vendors at the site can be persistent but friendly, and a polite no is generally enough.