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GHF's The Forum on Global Heritage in a Developing World: Focus on Asia in the News
On May 3, 2012 at the Asia Society in New York, GHF hosted "The Forum on Global Heritage in a Developing World: Focus on Asia," a discussion of development challenges facing Asia’s most important and endangered heritage sites. The day-long event featured a diverse program of speakers and panelists, and was well-attended by leading experts in conservation, international development, venture philanthropy, technology, travel, academia and media.
GHF Mirador in Smithsonian Magazine
El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya
April 2011
By Chip Brown
Photographs by Christian Ziegler
Now overgrown by jungle, the ancient site was once the thriving capital of the Maya civilization
The peak of La Danta—one of the world’s largest pyramids—pokes through the forest canopy. “All this was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Richard Hansen. “It’s like finding Pompeii.” Christian Ziegler
Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the army ants inhabiting the last great swath of subtropical rain forest in Mesoamerica.
Mercifully, Itzamna, the supreme creator god of the ancient Maya, had favored us with a pilot named Guillermo Lozano, who was now easing his maroon-striped Bell helicopter into the air. It was a Sunday morning in northern Guatemala, late October. Next to him up front was the archaeologist Richard Hansen, the director and principal investigator of the Mirador Basin Project. About a half-hour’s flying time due north was the Mirador basin itself—a 2,475-square-mile tract of jungle in northern Guatemala and Campeche, Mexico, filled with hidden ruins that Hansen and others refer to as “the cradle of Maya civilization.”
