Redirected from El Peten
Ruins such as Tikal, Machaquila, Naranjo, Nakum, Piedras Negras, Seibal[?], Uaxactun, and Yaxha perserve important reminents of the Classic Maya in the Peten.
After the Classic collapse the population of the area continued to drop massively. The first Europeans to visit the region, an expedition lead by Hernan Cortes which passed through in 1524 - 1525, reported that the region mostly had small towns separated by thick forest, with Tayasal[?] being the only sizable inhabited city they observed in the region.
After Cortes' expedition, the Spanish largely left the Peten alone for generations until an expedition from Yucatan succeeded in conquering the last independent Maya state there in the late 17th century (see: Spanish Conquest of Yucatan).
The Spanish town of Flores was established atop the site of Tayasal, but this remained an isolated backwater through the colonial era and after the independence of Mexico and Central America. When Guatemalan President Rafael Carrera[?] sent a small force to Flores to claim the region for Guatemala in the 1840s, the governments of Mexico and Yucatan decided the region was not worth the trouble of contesting.
Starting in the 1960s the Guatemalan government offered land in Peten to any citizen willing to settle on it and pay a fee of $25. A road was opened up to Flores, although it was unpaved, and the notorious bus trip to Flores was known to take up to 24 hours to travel the 300 miles. Small airports were built at Flores and Tikal, bringing tourists to the region. In the early 1970s a road was opened from Tikal to Belize.
The first paved road in Peten was built in 1982.
Since the 1990s many new settlers have come to the Peten and it is experiencing severe deforestation.
El Peten consists of the following municipalites, listed with their population in 2000:
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump