The Mayans were American Indians who built a great civilization before the first Europeans arrived in the New World. The Mayan kingdom was located in what is now southern Mexico and northwestern Central America. Today, there is only one nation whose population is still largely Mayan, Guatemala.
About the size of Louisiana, Guatemala is located southeast of Mexico, with a short coast on the Atlantic and a longer coast on the Pacific. The northern part of the country is covered by a huge rain finest, and the southern part is mostly mountainous.
Guatemala’s population in the 1980s was about 7 million, the largest in Central America. About half of the people in this nation are Mayans. Although Spanish is the official language of Guatemala, many people still speak Mayan and other Indian languages.
