Hey, that’s a great question. There were a combination of factors that made it difficult for Spanish conquistadors to settle there, which I will outline below, but I will also argue that the Spanish experience in the Maya world was actually the norm for Spanish “Conquests” throughout the Americas.

First, the Maya world was never a unified entity. Preclassic, Classic, Postclassic...Maya power was always fragmented into tiny shards cobbled together in little alliances. There was never a Maya empire at any point. So even when the conquistador/indigenous invasions came through, they struggled to gain a sizable foothold because every time they collected a few political pieces through conquest and alliance, they were never really big enough to constitute a larger political entity. Also keep in mind that the Maya world stretched from the Gulf Coast, to the northern part of Yucatan, all the way to Chiapas, Guatemala, Honduras, and el Salvador. It’s a giant space, covering much of what is today Mexico and Central America, and much of the geography is quite rugged. This made it impossible to simply invade and be done with it.

Secondly, there were very few conquistadors. Conquistador armies were tiny, numbering just a few hundred or less. Expeditions for these middling men were expensive, with each soldier expected to supply their own weapons and captains paying for most of the rest of the goods. In new, foreign lands, they operated completely blindly. They invaded territories because they heard rumors of great wealth, but they had no maps, geographic knowledge, language abilities, or other military intelligence on these new places. Unsurprisingly, the first invasions of Guatemala, Honduras, and Yucatan were disasters. The armies were easily manipulated and ambushed in unfamiliar places. Without much local support or geographic knowledge, most of the soldiers on these early expeditions died of starvation and disease without conquering anything.

The failure of all these invasions calls into question the importance of “advanced” technology in the Spanish invasions. The military hardware trumpeted by Cortés and later historians, right on down to Jared Diamond, says that horses, guns, and steel were contributing factors to the swift defeat of indigenous peoples, but why then were these technologies rendered useless pretty much everywhere in the Americas? It’s because there was not a swift defeat of indigenous people anywhere in the Americas, and the horses and weapons actually made very little difference. It took various Maya groups about one or two skirmishes with Spanish forces to figure out that they didn´t play by Mesoamerican rules, so the Mayas needed to use ambushes, rugged terrain, spiked pits to spear horses, and local knowledge to their advantage to overcome these foreign invasions. There were so few horses, guns, and cannons among the conquistadors that they just weren’t effective. And most of the horses died anyway; they were more status symbols for Spaniards. But anyway, I digress.

With the first waves of conquistador armies repulsed, Spaniards regrouped by making alliances and recruiting tens of thousands of Nahua soldiers from Central Mexico, and later soldiers from other Maya groups. These soldiers made up the overwhelming majority of soldiers on any Conquest-era expedition. In addition to being the core of the armies, they were its porters, carrying all the gear. They found the food and water sources. They cleared paths and built roads. They planned the invasion routes and acted as scouts. It was only once the “Spanish” armies were actually mostly armies of indigenous soldiers that they made any progress in their invasions. With indigenous captains, not Spanish captains running the show, the armies now had the ability to communicate with locals, were able to gain military intelligence, were able to live off the land and feed themselves, and were able to match up better against Maya armies. This is what allowed Alvarado to finally make some progress (from his perspective) in the Guatemalan Highlands, and the Montejo family to gain a foothold at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Like Cortés before them, the Spanish captains took credit for the invasions and proudly described them as glorious Spanish Conquests, even though they weren’t. These minor successes took more than a generation of warfare to carve out, took wave after wave after wave of invasion to wear down the small, scattered Maya polities, and only managed to secure small pieces of the Maya world over which the Spaniards attempted, and largely failed, to rule. The invasions cost tens of thousands of lives, both Central Mexican and Maya, and most of the conquistadors died too. Tragically, the invasions also initiated huge upheavals to indigenous societies, introduced Old World diseases, and led to massive indigenous slave raids. In short, for the Spaniards, the invasions of the Maya world was a massive pain for little gain. After more than a generation of upheaval, the invasions largely stalled out, then made very little more progress for the next century while the Spanish state gradually consolidated its rule over the small Maya realms it did manage to gain access to.

But this was actually the norm for Spanish invasions. Nearly every one of them were disasters or draws. Almost all conquistadors died. All invasions came to require massive buy-in from indigenous soldiers, and they were successful only when indigenous people were running the show. As I’ve written before on AskHistorians, a better way to think about the Spanish “Conquests” is that it was not Spaniards conquering indigenous people, but rather indigenous people fighting indigenous wars, conquering other indigenous rivals, and building what they thought would be new indigenous empires-polities, only to be betrayed by their new foreign, scary allies over the next century and a half. Everywhere we look in the Americas, this is what “Spanish” “conquests” were. West Mexico...failure, followed by long drawn out warfare led by indigenous people. Northern Mexico and New Mexico...failure, followed by long drawn out warfare. What is today the American Southeast...failure, followed by long drawn out warfare. Colombia...failure, followed by long drawn out warfare. Río de la Plata...failure, followed by long drawn out warfare with indigenous groups. The Maya are not the exception, but the rule.