Ex Hacienda Atlacomulco

San Antonio Atlacomulco was for centuries one of the sugar mills of the Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca, the estate the Crown granted to Hernán Cortés. The restored main house now operates as the Hotel & Spa Hacienda de Cortés, in the Atlacomulco district of Jiutepec on the edge of Cuernavaca (Plaza Kennedy 90). That shapes the visit: you go as a guest or a diner, not to a museum with entry hours.

According to the hotel's own history, the land goes back to the royal grant Cortés received around 1529 along with the title of Marqués del Valle, and an aqueduct of about 1,700 m (the hotel gives two figures, 1,680 and 1,840) was started in 1530 to bring water from the Chapultepec springs to the cane fields. In 1642 the lessee, in agreement with the marquises, moved the workers, livestock and machinery of the old Tlaltenango mill to Atlacomulco, and the buildings that survive today date from that move.

The marquisate passed by marriage to the Italian Pignatelli family, dukes of Monteleone, who held the estate well into the twentieth century. Lucas Alamán managed it until his death in 1853, and the alcohol distillery went up under his administration; a plaque on that building's facade records it. The hotel adds that in 1889 Atlacomulco sugar won first prize and a silver medal at the Paris Exposition, and its cane brandy an honourable mention.

In the same account the main house was wrecked and abandoned during the Revolution, bought in 1953 by José Villanueva Aguilera, then by Ramón Beteta a year later, and restored in 1973. Today you find stone arches, courtyards, painted dados along the corridors and old tools from the estate, and rooms in several categories from Deluxe to Presidential Suite. Founding dates come mostly from the hotel itself, so read them as its version of the story.