The Maya were brilliant builders and thinkers who lived in Central America thousands of years ago. At Copán, they built plazas, temples, ball courts, and palaces - all from stone, without any metal tools or wheeled vehicles. That makes the craftsmanship even more astonishing.
The Hieroglyphic Stairway is one of the most jaw-dropping things at Copán. It is a wide stone staircase with more than 2,000 carved symbols, called glyphs, running all the way up. This is the longest Maya hieroglyphic inscription ever found - like reading a whole book carved in stone steps.
Around the main plaza stand tall stelae - stone pillars carved with the faces and stories of Copán's rulers. Each one took skilled artists a very long time to make, working with only stone and obsidian tools. Some stelae are taller than two grown adults standing on each other's shoulders.
Inside the ruins there is a whole secret world underground - tunnels that archaeologists dug to find even older temples buried beneath the ones you can see. Some tunnels are open for visitors and lead to brightly painted walls hidden for centuries.
Scarlet macaws (Honduras's national bird!) were sacred to the Maya. Scientists found evidence that macaws were raised right here at Copán. Today you can sometimes spot their bright-red flash in the surrounding forest.