Palenque, RUINS OF, lie between the Michol and Chacamas rivers, in the north of the Mexican state of Chiapas, 6½ miles E. of the village of Santo Domingo de Palenque. The ruins extend over 20 to 30 acres, and are buried in a dense tropical forest; trees grow over and about the buildings, and rise even from the tower. The ruins consist of vast artificial terraces, or terraced truncated pyramids, of cut stone, surmounted by edifices of peculiar and solid architecture, also of cut stone, covered with figures in relief, or figures and hieroglyphics in stucco, with remains of brilliant colours. Most of the buildings are of one story, but a few are two, three, and some may have been four stories. The principal structure, known as the Palace, is 228 feet long, 180 feet deep, and some 25 feet high, standing on a terraced truncated pyramid of corresponding dimensions; the front contained fourteen doorways, each about 9 feet wide. The building was irregular, and built in two distinct parts, with double galleries of unequal length running round it, and two large courts, also irregular in shape. Charnay holds that the Palace was a magnificent convent; Palenque, he says, was a holy city, 'a place of pilgrimage, teeming with shrines and temples, a vast and much-sought burial-place;' in the whole place 'there seems to have been nothing but temples and tombs.'
See Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central America, &c., and Catherwood's Views of Ancient Monuments, &c.; Charnay's Ancient Cities of the New World (Eng. trans. 1887); also La Rochefoucauld, Palenque et la Civilisation Maya (Paris, 1888).