Chikindzonot

Chikindzonot is the seat of a municipality in the far southeast of Yucatán, close to the Quintana Roo border, about 58 km south of Valladolid and some 170 km from Mérida. The town has 3,019 people (2020 census), and the whole municipality 4,363 spread over 43 localities, the largest after the seat being Ichmul and Chan-Chichimilá. It is a strongly Maya place: around 98% of the municipality's residents over five speak Maya. The name means "cenote of the west", from chik'in (west) and ts'ono'ot (cenote), and five cenotes are recorded in the municipality, among them Chikindzonot, Chan Dzitnup, El Cabo, Naranja and Yaaxdzonot.

Before the conquest the area belonged to the Maya province of Cochua; local tradition names Nacahum Cochua as its halach uinik in the 16th century. An encomienda followed in the late 1500s. In the Caste War the town was sacked by the rebels, its roughly 300 non-Maya residents fled, and it lay largely abandoned for much of the second half of the 19th century; the army recovered the area in 1849, but resettlement only took hold in the early 1900s. Chikindzonot became a municipality of its own on 21 February 1957, split off from Tekom.

The reason to stop is the parish church, picked by the Diario de Yucatán as one of its "100 jewels" of the state as an example of Maya-Christian building. It began in the 16th century as a structure of perishable materials raised on a pre-Hispanic Maya stone platform; the present church and its facade date from the late 18th century (a stone dated 1793, now lost, recorded the work). The red-and-white facade, framed by two bell towers, is carved with flowers and fish, pilasters showing Adam and Eve beside the door, statues of Saints Peter and Paul, and a niche above the choir window with a relief of the Virgin of Candelaria, the patron, whose feast is 2 February. Around the town the land is flat and mostly covered in forest, with milpa clearings.