El Mirador history · History of El Mirador
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History of El Mirador
History of El Mirador
El Mirador flourished as a trading center from around 200 BCE to 150 CE during the Maya Pre-Classic Period. With a population as high as 80,000, it was one of the first large cities in North America. In the mid second century CE the entire Mirador Basin with its numerous other cities and villages became rapidly depopulated. There is little evidence of a population until there was a modest one in the Late Classic Period, and there is no permanent population today.
On April 18th, 2002, President Alfonso Portillo signed legislation, which established the Mirador Basin National Monument as a Special Archaeological Zone. This is intended to provide for the permanent protection of 600,000 acres of tropical rainforest in this area, which surrounds the oldest and largest Maya archaeological sites in Mesoamerica. The Mirador Basin National Monument is designed as a wilderness preserve without roads.
However, events of 2005 in Guatemala have pitted ranching and logging interests against this effort. Even some locals who do not see how tourism in the area will benefit them yet are in favor of what will result in roads, short term logging, non-sustainable swidden agriculture and ranches where once there was rain forest. See .
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El Mirador Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.