Can You Climb the Pyramids at Teotihuacan?

What's open, what's closed

Two large pyramids dominate Teotihuacan, and only one of them can be climbed at all in 2026. The Pyramid of the Moon's first section reopened in May 2025 after five years of conservation work on its ancient stairways. The Pyramid of the Sun has stayed closed since 2020, and Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH, has confirmed the closure is permanent, not a pause while repairs finish.

Everything else on site is experienced at ground level: the Avenue of the Dead, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent inside the Citadel, and the painted pillars at the Palace of Quetzalpapalotl. None of those were built as climbing structures the way the two pyramids were, so nothing has changed there.

• Open: the Pyramid of the Moon's first section, five platforms, 47 steps
• Closed for good: the Pyramid of the Sun's full 248-step stairway
• Ground level only, unchanged: the Avenue of the Dead, the Citadel, the Palace of Quetzalpapalotl

Where you can actually go

The table below covers every structure travellers ask about, what you're allowed to do at each in 2026, and what the climb or the walk actually shows you once you're there.

Reading that table honestly

One structure, the Moon, gives you height. Everything else gives you proximity instead: carved stone at arm's length, murals under a roof, the scale of the Sun pyramid felt by standing at its base rather than on top of it. Neither is a lesser experience, but it is a different one than the summit photos in older guidebooks show.

What the closures changed

The table below lines up what people still expect from an old photo or an outdated blog post against what is actually true on the ground in 2026, and what to do instead of chasing the version that no longer exists.

Five years of work, one section back

The Pyramid of the Moon closed to climbers years earlier while INAH carried out conservation work on its stone stairways, which had worn unevenly under decades of foot traffic. On 19 May 2025, after five years of that work, the first section reopened to visitors: five platforms, 47 steps, ending at a landing partway up the structure. The upper levels, above that landing, remain closed and are not part of any current tour, guided or independent.

It is not a token climb. Forty-seven steps is enough to change the view completely. From the top of the first section you look straight down the 2.4 km Avenue of the Dead toward the Citadel, with the Pyramid of the Sun rising on your left. Since the Sun's own stairway closed, this is the only elevated public vantage point left at Teotihuacan, which is part of why the Moon reopening mattered beyond the climb itself.

The 16:00 caveat

One secondary source reports that climbing access to the Moon pyramid's first section can stop around 16:00, ahead of the site's own last-admission time of 16:30. That is reported, not confirmed policy, and it isn't consistent across every account we've checked. If reaching the top of the first section matters to your day, plan to be there well before mid-afternoon and confirm the current cutoff with staff at the gate rather than relying on a fixed clock time.

A closure that became permanent

The Pyramid of the Sun is the third-largest pyramid on earth, about 63 metres tall, and for most of the twentieth century climbing its 248-step stairway was the single most-repeated Teotihuacan experience. That ended in 2020, when the climb closed along with the rest of the site during a period of restricted access. Unlike the Moon pyramid, the Sun's closure was never framed as conservation-in-progress with a reopening date attached. INAH has since confirmed it as permanent.

The practical reason is scale: the Sun's stairway is longer, steeper in sections, and carries far higher visitor volume than the Moon's ever did, given how central the climb was to a standard visit. No public timeline for a partial reopening, on the Moon's model, has been announced. Every tour operator selling a Teotihuacan itinerary in 2026, including every one listed on this site, plans around the summit staying closed.

What the base still gives you

Standing at the foot of the Sun pyramid remains one of the better ways to register its size, arguably better than the old photos taken from partway up its own stairs, since you can see the full rise of the structure at once rather than a foreshortened slice of it. Most guided visits spend real time here regardless of the climbing rules, walking the perimeter and pointing out the platforms and stonework at eye level that a fast climb up and back tends to skip.

The rest of the site is unaffected

The climbing rules only ever applied to the two big pyramids. Everything else at Teotihuacan is walked, not climbed, and none of it has changed. The Avenue of the Dead runs 2.4 km through the heart of the site with no shade at any point, and every tour covers some portion of it on foot regardless of which structures are open above ground level.

Inside the Citadel, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent is approached at ground level, close enough to see the carved serpent heads that give it its name. The Palace of Quetzalpapalotl, near the Pyramid of the Moon, is entered and walked through rather than climbed, and holds some of the best-preserved murals and carved pillars anywhere on the site. None of these were ever part of the climbing conversation, and the current rules leave them exactly as they were.

Pick a guide, not a climb

With one pyramid closed to climbers and the other capped at 47 steps, the honest reason to choose one tour over another has shifted from "which one lets me climb higher" to "which one shows me the most at ground level." A private historian-led tour built around five structures, including the Palace of Quetzalpapalotl and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, plays to that shift directly: it never depended on the Sun's stairway being open in the first place.

The same logic applies to tours that avoid commercial stops in favor of time on site, like the no-commercial-stops option, which spends its three hours on the full Avenue of the Dead and both pyramid complexes rather than budgeting time for a climb that no longer happens. And because the Moon's open section is now the only elevated view at Teotihuacan, arriving early still matters: an early-access departure gets you to that platform before the mid-morning coach wave, when the landing at the top of the first section is genuinely quiet rather than queued.

What to skip

Any listing or older blog post that promises a climb to the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun is describing a version of Teotihuacan that hasn't existed since 2020. If a tour's marketing photos show a group standing on top of the Sun pyramid, treat that as an old photo, not a current itinerary.

The equinox on the summit

For decades, the defining Teotihuacan photograph was a crowd dressed in white standing on the flat top of the Pyramid of the Sun at dawn on the spring equinox, 21 March, arms raised to catch the year's first direct light. That specific image is no longer something any visitor can recreate. With the summit closed since 2020, the ritual that used to happen up there now happens at ground level and on the Moon pyramid's open first section instead.

The day itself hasn't lost its pull. More than 12,000 visitors came for the 2025 equinox, gathering along the Avenue of the Dead and at the base of both pyramids rather than on top of them. If the equinox is the reason you're planning a visit, expect a crowded, ground-level version of the tradition rather than the summit scene from older photographs, and plan your day and your tour timing around that reality rather than the picture you remember.

None of this makes Teotihuacan less worth seeing, it just changes what the day is built around. Forty-seven steps and a ground-level walk past carved stone and painted pillars is a different visit than the one older guidebooks describe, and for most travellers, comparing guided tours of the pyramids built around that reality turns out to be enough. For the detail either side of this page, see the best photo spots at teotihuacan, is teotihuacan worth visiting.

The listing behind most of the numbers here is the Private Teotihuacan Tour with Historian Hector (5 Hours, SUV Pickup).