Chenché de las Torres

Chenché de las Torres is a small village of about 250 people (253 in the 2020 census) in the municipality of Temax, grown up around one of the most unusual haciendas in Yucatán. It lies about 5 km southwest of Temax and about 69 km east-northeast of Mérida in a straight line, reached by a side road from the Cansahcab–Temax highway. The name joins the Maya word chenché with the Spanish torres, "towers", and the towers are the point.

The estate belonged to Álvaro Peón de Regil and Joaquina Peón Castellanos, the Count and Countess of Miraflores, who had the main house rebuilt to look like a European medieval fortress. Two towers 15 to 20 metres high rise over crenellated walls, heraldic shields decorate the façade, and the couple's coats of arms flank the front door. A neo-Gothic chapel stands in the grounds. A photograph by Pedro Guerra from around 1880 shows the castle-like front with the estate's workers lined up before it. The property later passed to the Manzanilla family, who acquired it from Candelaria Peón y Peón, the last descendant of the Miraflores line. When the Manzanillas left in the 1950s they abandoned the hacienda's archive in a storeroom; the anthropologist Michel Antochiw persuaded them to donate it, and the papers are now held by the Centro Cultural Pro Historia Peninsular de Yucatán, where researchers can consult them. With the land reform of 1937 the fields became an ejido.

By the 1950s the house was in ruins. Its current owner, Isabelle Kimmelman, began a restoration in 2001 that replaced roofs and floors with locally made pasta tiles, recreated the stencilled wall patterns with local craftsmen and fully restored the chapel, which once served the village as well as the owners. The house is a private home and is not open to the public, but the towers, gates and walls can be seen from the village streets. Near the village are the ruins of the old railway station and the overgrown beds of the rail lines that once ran to Temax and Santa María.