Barrio de Santiago

Santiago is one of the historic barrios of Mérida, a few blocks west of the Plaza Grande around the church of Santiago Apóstol, its park and its market, on Calle 59. In the colonial city each quarter outside the Spanish core took the name of its patron saint, and Santiago, named after Saint James, the patron of Spain, became the barrio on the west side. It is still a lived-in neighbourhood rather than a tourist strip, and it is on the way from the centre to the Parque Zoológico del Centenario.

Tradition holds that Santiago grew from the first Maya settlement the Spanish came upon when they entered T'ho, the Maya city on which Mérida was founded in 1542, and a stone plaque inside the parish church marks it as the place where the city's first Mass was said. During the colonial period it was an indigenous barrio with its own caciques, and from the 16th century Nahua soldiers who had come with Montejo's army settled here and in San Cristóbal and San Román, exempt from tribute in return for their service. The camino real to Sisal, then the most important port of the peninsula, passed through the barrio on its way out of the city.

Today the barrio's life revolves around three places. The parish church of Santiago Apóstol faces the park, where every Tuesday at 8 p.m. the city's orchestra plays danzón, mambo and cha-cha-chá for Remembranzas Musicales, a free evening in which couples of all ages turn the square into a dance floor. Beside it, the Santiago market, officially Mercado Santos Degollado, sells fruit, vegetables, meat and flowers by day and is known for its food stalls: tortas de cochinita, panuchos, turkey broth, vaporcitos and horchata. Santiago also claims the marquesita, the rolled crêpe filled with Edam-type cheese now sold all over Mérida; it was created here by Vicente Mena Muñoz and his wife Carmen Mendoza, and a vendor who has sold them outside the church for more than 50 years still keeps the original recipe.