Campeche is the quiet third of the Yucatán peninsula. It has no Caribbean coast and no resorts, and what it has instead is the best-preserved walled city in Mexico and the biggest Maya ruin in the country.
San Francisco de Campeche was fortified in the seventeenth century against pirates — the walls, two forts and eight bastions are still there — and the grid inside is painted in sherbet colours and kept immaculately. It became a UNESCO site in 1999 and remains oddly empty of visitors.
Calakmul, in the far south near the Guatemalan border, was one of the two superpowers of the Maya classic period and fought Tikal for two centuries. It sits inside a 7,000 km² biosphere reserve; the climb up Structure II puts you above a canopy with jaguar, howler monkeys and ocellated turkey underneath, and almost nobody else on the site.
Edzná is closer to the capital and easier — a five-storey palace-pyramid and a drainage system that tells you how the city survived in a place with no rivers.
Champotón is where the Spanish were first beaten back by the Maya, in 1517, and Isla Aguada sits on the lagoon where dolphins come in.
