File:Mexico-6729B - Balankanché Caves (4738730346).jpg

English: The first man of modern times to see the treasure of Balankanche was a tour guide from Chichen Itza. In 1959, while exploring the cave, Gomez discovered a passageway leading deep into the caverns. It took him two hours to follow out the path that eventually brought him face to face with the treasures left by the ancient Maya 800 years ago.

Dr. E. Wyllys Andrews, leader of the National Geographic Society Expedition working nearby, was immediately summoned to inspect the discovery. Arriving into the cave, he was astonished when he saw with the beam of his headlamp hundreds of glittering stalactites surrounding a huge stalagmite (resembling a ceiba tree) which stretched from floor to ceiling in the center of the enormous vault. Carefully placed around the base of this unusual geological formation, said to be the "sacred tree inside the earth", were a great variety of ceremonial objects, offering to the rain god Tlaloc and left undisturbed through centuries of darkness.

On the slimy cave floor were brightly painted clay vessels and metates (stones for grinding maize), and other objects still lying where the priests had left them. Many were incense burners shaped as effigies of the rain god Tlaloc, whose grotesque, sneering face was molded in bas-relief on the clay itself.

The original Tlaloc effigy pots still lay all around the column as they were found. About a thousand years ago the local Maya had performed elaborate rites in this secret lair so near the underworld. Tlaloc was originally not a Maya but a central Mexican god. By appealing to this deity, rather than the Maya rain god, Chaac, the Balankanche worshippers have shown a close affiliation with civilizations more than 800 miles away, north of today's Mexico City. Had Tlaloc failed them? For whatever reason, the Maya had sealed shut the shrine—no doubt forever, they hoped, for they had taken pains to camouflage the portal. Yet a faint memory of the lost shrine has perhaps come down through the centuries in the name of the cave. Balankanche translates as "throne of the jaguar" but can also mean "hidden throne".