Minanbé, the intact Maya city rediscovered in the Calakmul jungle

In the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, in Mexico, a team of Mexican and Slovenian researchers has announced the discovery of a Maya city that has remained intact for over a thousand years, with no signs of looting or clandestine excavation. The official announcement came from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) on June 22, 2026.

The site, named Minanbé — which in Yucatec Maya means “there is no road” — covers approximately 15 hectares and was identified through aerial surveys using LiDAR technology, the same method used in recent years to map forest areas otherwise inaccessible to traditional archaeological research.

Among the structures found, a pyramidal temple over 13 meters high stands out, built in the architectural style known as Río Bec, typical of certain areas of the central Maya Lowlands. Alongside the temple, fourteen stelae and altars dating to the Late Classic period, between 600 and 900 AD, have been catalogued.

Behind the discovery lies three decades of research conducted by Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a specialist in the central Maya Lowlands. It is precisely this continuity of fieldwork that made possible the identification of a site of this size in an area of the jungle that had until now remained little explored.

The element that scholars describe as most surprising concerns not so much the size of the site as its state of preservation: Minanbé shows no sign of looting or clandestine excavation, a rare condition for a Maya site of these proportions, which are often exposed over the centuries to unauthorized interventions.

The discovery adds to the body of knowledge about the central Maya Lowlands, an area where remote sensing technologies have in recent years made it possible to identify settlements that ground survey alone could not have brought to light, in a region covered for the most part by dense forest.