Most people are not aware that one of Chichen Itza’s most famous visitors was Tarzan of the Apes. The fictional creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs visited the ancient Maya city not once, but twice.

The first time was in 1941 in Argosy magazine. “The Quest of Tarzan” was published in three parts, and was the last Tarzan story written by Burroughs. In it, Tarzan is shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific where he discovers a replica of Chichen Itza built by city’s former inhabitants who had left the Yucatan many centuries before. The story was reprinted in the 1960s in the book, Tarzan and the Castaways.

Tarzan again visited Chichen Itza in the late 1970s in a television cartoon. In “Tarzan and the Space God,” the Lord of the Jungle finds the people of Chichen Itza, not in the Pacific, but in Africa. In a nod to the works of Erich von Daniken, the Maya have been enslaved by aliens from another planet.

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