Mictlan

Mictlan, the Nahuatl form of Mitla, means "place of the dead"; its Zapotec name, Lyobaa, means "place of rest". It stands at the head of the Tlacolula valley in Oaxaca, a fortified village that grew into the main religious centre of the Zapotec while Monte Albán lay empty. Mixtec lords took control of the area around the year 1000, though many Zapotec stayed, and the city reached its greatest size between 750 and 1521, with both peoples' styles in its buildings. Nobles buried here were expected to become "cloud people" who spoke for the living, and the city was meant as a gateway between the living and the dead.

Its palaces and halls are covered with mosaic fretwork of small, polished stones fitted together without mortar, and the Hall of the Columns is roofed on single-block pillars. When the Spanish came in the 1520s the high priest, the Uija-tào, still lived in Mitla, in a town of one to two square kilometres fed by more than twenty square kilometres of intensive farmland. In the sixteenth century the Spanish dismantled the palaces, used their stones to build the church of San Pablo on part of the ruins, and housed priests in some of the old rooms.