Hacienda Apanquetzalco

The Apanquetzalco ruins sit on the northwest edge of the city of Yautepec, between the Vicente Estrada Cajigal and Apanquetzalco neighbourhoods. This was a sugar mill, and parts of its water-driven machinery can still be made out: the aqueduct, the housing of the mill wheel, the milling halls and the boiler and furnace house. The two-storey main house is still standing, along with a single-nave chapel with a belfry gable.

The story told by Yautepec's chronicler, César Ortiz Triana, begins with a 1602 grant for a cane field to Francisco Parraza y Rojas; other plots were leased by Dominican friars in 1619. The first documented sugar factory on the site dates from 1714. Milling later stopped and the estate switched to corn, vegetables, fruit and cattle. An 1787 inventory valued it at 66,161 pesos, with about 14 caballerías (around 600 hectares). By the late 1800s its land had been absorbed by the Atlihuayan hacienda and the buildings were left as storerooms. On 11 March 1911, Lucio Moreno, Diego Ruiz and Román Castro set out from this hacienda for Yautepec to rise for the Maderista cause. In 1985 farmers of the Yautepec ejido took the property back.

Today part of the compound is run as an event venue under the name Ex Hacienda Imago Apanquetzalco: its Bodas.com.mx listing mentions a chapel, garden, terrace, pool and five guest rooms, with one celebration per day. It is worth asking ahead whether you can walk through the ruins. The surviving stone and adobe walls make a striking backdrop, and the main house has been used for film and television shoots.