In 1674, Francisco de Burgoa, a historian of the storied Dominican Order religious sect, wrote of a vast labyrinth under the ancient ruins of Mitla in Mexico that the Zapotec people saw as an entrance to the underworld.
Now, a team of researchers have proven the legend to be true by using modern tools to finally discover the sprawling underground temple of Lyobaa—which is Zapotec for “place of rest”—beneath the ancient site.
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Mitla was inhabited as early as roughly 2,000 years ago, and was a significant religious site for the Zapotec people at this time. When Spanish colonizers, including Catholics like de Burgoa, invaded, they wrecked the site and drove away its inhabitants. As a blog post detailing the findings explains, de Burgoa reported a fantastical underground component: “A vast subterranean temple consisting of four interconnected chambers, containing the tombs of the high priests and the kings of Teozapotlán. From the last subterranean chamber, a stone door led into a deep cavern extending thirty leagues below ground. This cavern was intersected by other passages like streets, its roof supported by pillars.”
Today, a Catholic church stands where this ancient center of Zapotec life once thrived, and it’s there that an interdisciplinary team of researchers from several Mexican institutions and the government decided to look for signs of the ancient entrance to the underworld during a 2022 expedition.
De Burgoa wrote that “the missionaries had all entrances to this underground labyrinth sealed, leaving only the palaces standing above ground,” the researchers explain. To uncover it, the team used ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, and seismic noise tomography. They found “a large void” connected to a “significant geophysical anomaly,” according to the blog post, and two passages entering the main void, 5-to-8 meters underground.
“A possible blocked up entrance was identified underneath the main altar of the Catholic church,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers wrote that the identified underground structures have “a far greater and more complex articulation” than elsewhere in the site, and that they may not have been connected to the above-ground structures that stand there today.
Archaeologists recently identified another ancient “portal to the underworld” in modern-day Israel. The discovery of skulls, weapons, and over 100 oil lamps dating back nearly 2,000 years in a cave near Jerusalem—collected between 2010 and 2016—indicate that the cave has “all the cultic and physical elements necessary to serve as a possible portal to the underworld” and was used for necromancy ceremonies, the researchers wrote in a study.
Project Lyobaa—as the collaboration between the Mexican National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Association for Archaeological Research and Exploration, (ARX Project) is called—isn’t finished. The researchers are planning a second research expedition in September to investigate the remaining areas of Mitla.
