Catedral de San Ildefonso

The Cathedral of San Ildefonso fills the east side of Mérida's Plaza Grande, on Calle 60. It is the seat of the Archdiocese of Yucatán and the oldest cathedral in Mexico, usually counted as the first built on the American mainland; only Santo Domingo's, on the island of Hispaniola, was completed earlier. The diocese was created in 1561 with Saint Ildephonsus of Toledo as its patron, and work began the next year on the site of an earlier chapel. Pedro de Aulestia started the building and Juan Miguel de Agüero finished it in 1598. Maya laborers built it, reusing cut stone from the temples of T'Hó, the Maya city the Spanish founded Mérida on.

From the plaza you see a broad, plain Renaissance front between two towers with Moorish-style tops. The main door, the Puerta del Perdón, is flanked by statues of Saint Peter with his keys and Saint Paul with a sword and book, and above it is a stone coat of arms with an inscription naming Philip III and the year 1599. The shield has its own history: after independence it was partly smashed, an eagle with Iturbide's imperial crown was placed in it in 1824, and later the whole thing was covered in cement, which has since been removed. Inside, the church is a Latin cross with three naves, coffered vaults over the center and ribbed Gothic vaults over the aisles, and a dome.

The interior is bare for a cathedral, and that is a scar of the Mexican Revolution. In September 1915, as Salvador Alvarado's troops took control of Yucatán, a mob sacked the building and burned its baroque and churrigueresque altarpieces, its images and a German Walcker organ from 1902. The next year two chapels were pulled down to separate the cathedral from the bishop's palace, and the gap became the Pasaje de la Revolución, the covered walkway that now leads to the MACAY art museum. Over the high altar hangs the Cristo de la Unidad, a very large wooden crucifix by the Spanish sculptor Ramón Lapayese del Río. In its own chapel on the north side is the Cristo de las Ampollas, the dark 'blistered Christ' said to have been carved in the 17th century in Ichmul from a tree that burned all night without being consumed, and to have come through a church fire blackened and blistered; the original was destroyed in 1915, and the image venerated today replaced it. Its feast, from 14 September to 17 October, brings the city's gremios (guilds) to the cathedral in procession with their banners, ending with a Mass and procession on 17 October.