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Towering above the rainforest, Tikal is possibly the most magnificent of all Maya ruins. The site is dominated by five enormous temples, steep-sided granite pyramids that rise up to 60m from the forest floor, while around them are literally thousands of other structures, many half-strangled by giant roots and still hidden beneath mounds of earth. The site itself is deep in the jungle of the Parque Nacional Tikal , a protected area of some 370 square kilometres, on the edge of the even larger Maya Biosphere Reserve. The trees around the ruins are home to hundreds of species including howler and spider monkeys, toucans and parakeets. The sheer scale of the place is overwhelming, and its atmosphere spellbinding. Whether you can spare as little as an hour or as long as a week, it's always worth the trip. Plane schedules are designed to make it easy to visit the ruins as a day-trip from Flores or Guatemala City, but if you can spare the time it's well worth staying overnight , partly because you'll need the extra time to do justice to the ruins themselves but, more importantly, to spend dawn and dusk at the site, when the forest canopy bursts into a frenzy of sound and activity. The air fills with the screech of toucans and the roar of howler monkeys, while flocks of parakeets wheel around the temples, and bats launch themselves into the night. With a bit of luck you might even see a grey fox sneak across one of the plazas.
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