Word: yucatan
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Perhaps unfortunately for present knowledge, Grijalva decided not to land, but modern archaeologists believe that that last "city or town" was Tulum (or Tuloom), the finest ruined city now known on the east coast of Yucatan, whose white walls top a cliff directly over the restless waters of the Caribbean...
...Europeans from whom we Americans are descended first heard of the great stone-built cities of the tropical New World from the Spanish conquerors. Columbus, on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, just missed becoming the discoverer of Yucatan when he failed to follow a canoe believed to have been filled with Yucatans, which he met off the coast of what is now Honduras...
...another Spaniard, Cordoba, touched the east coast of Yucatan, near Cape Catoche and Mujeres Island and saw "a large town standing back from the coast about two leagues . . .and . . idols. . .nearly all of them with figures of tall women, so that we called the place the Punta de Mugeres" (Women's Point). Juan de Grijalva a year later sailed from Cuba to the Island of Cozumel. After claiming that land for his sovereign with the usual blithe arrogance of his age, Grijalva crossed to the visible eastern shore of Yucatan, where his historian describes sighting "three large towns separated from...
Then, in 1519, came Cortez, who stopped in Yucatan only long enough to pick up the shipwrecked priest, Jeronimo de Aguilar, before proceeding along the coast to Vera Cruz, whence he marched inland. The discovery of great wealth in upland Mexico, and later in Peru, turned the attentions of the Spanish conquistadores from Yucatan, where little gold was to be had. The conquest of the hot lowlands, inhabited by the valiant Mayas, was long delayed. The Indians have never given up the struggle for independence and in the eastern part of the Yucatan peninsula, called Quintana Roo, they have retained...
Some of the priests, and especially Landa, the second Bishop of Yucatan left accounts of the old Indian life, but their writings were locked up in archives and escaped attention...