Dzununcán

Dzununcán is a comisaría of Mérida municipality about 10 km south of the city centre. Its Maya name is translated as 'hummingbird serpent'. It lies inside the Reserva Cuxtal, the ecological reserve that Mérida's city council created in 1993 to protect the forest and the aquifer south of the city, and it is one of only two comisarías in the reserve, with Molas, that did not grow out of a hacienda. Its territory also takes in about ten newer neighbourhoods on the edge of the city.

Dzununcán has grown steadily with Mérida: from 214 people in 1900 to 552 in 1970, 1,802 in 2010 and 2,388 at the 2020 census. It has the services of a small town: a central park, the comisaría building with its clock, a public library, a kindergarten, a primary school and a telesecundaria named after the sculptor Rómulo Rozo, and a house for the ejido, the village's communal farmland. Unusually for a Yucatecan village, it has places of worship of four different faiths, among them the Catholic church on the park and a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.

There is little to see in the village itself beyond the park and the church, but Dzununcán is the way into the southern part of the Cuxtal reserve. The road south from here leads through the old hacienda villages of Santa Cruz Palomeque and San José Tzal towards San Antonio Tzacalá and Petac, whose 17th-century hacienda is now a private guesthouse. Nearby inside the reserve are Molas, Xmatkuil, San Pedro Chimay and other former haciendas.