Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Guatemala gathers two cities where Maya religious life and Catholic institutional life sit visibly beside each other, one through a single preserved text and the other through the country's modern church.

Chichicastenango is a highland town in the Quiche department, its Spanish colonial name a Nahuatl word for place of the nettles, carried there by Tlaxcalan soldiers allied with the conquistadors; it sits near the ruins of the destroyed Kiche Maya capital and grew as a Dominican parish town in the colonial highlands. Its central place in religious history rests on one documented event: around 1701 to 1703 the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez, serving as parish priest, transcribed and translated the Popol Vuh, the Kiche Maya book of creation, preserving the sole surviving copy of a text that would otherwise have been lost. Anthropologists working in the highland Kiche region have long documented that Catholic and Maya religious life visibly coexist in the town's public spaces, a fact this atlas notes without describing either tradition's living practice in detail.

Guatemala City is the seat of a Catholic archdiocese whose auxiliary bishop Juan Gerardi was murdered in 1998, two days after presenting a report documenting civil war killings, a case among the most consequential in modern Latin American church history. The city has also seen the rapid Protestant and Pentecostal growth that has made Guatemala one of the region's most evangelical countries, while Maya religious practice continues alongside both, in the highlands and in the city itself, sometimes within Catholic parishes and sometimes apart from them.

Between a colonial friar's single transcription and a modern bishop's murdered report, both cities record the same coexistence from different centuries.