Hacienda San José Chactún

Hacienda San José Chactún is an old estate in the municipality of Maxcanú, about 7 km south of the town of Maxcanú and some 50 km southwest of Mérida as the crow flies. The hacienda is also the core of a small locality of the same name, home to 112 people in 2010. Chactún is often translated as "red stone", and the place is also called Piedra Roja or Piedra Colorada, supposedly after the natural colour of the stone of its buildings.

Its history is long. The first land title came from a royal decree of 9 January 1560; between 1623 and 1700 the property grew, absorbing the lands of neighbouring Nohcacab to become "Chactún Nohcacab". In the second half of the 18th century it was bought by a Spaniard, Pedro Tadeo, and in the 19th century it passed to Lorenzo Peón y Cano, then to María de Jesús Peón Fajardo and her son José Domínguez Peón; the same family kept it through the rest of the 19th and all of the 20th century, and also owned the Casa de Montejo in Mérida. Like other haciendas it began with maize and later added sugar cane, henequen and cattle. Domínguez Peón was a shareholder in the Mérida–Campeche railway, which opened in 1898, and secured one of its eight stops on the hacienda's land. After the 1937 land reform its fields became an ejido, and once henequen production ended the estate declined, until Sara Arrigunaga Juanes set out to keep the buildings standing and make the land productive again with cattle and citrus.

The estate is a set of buildings painted deep red: the main house, raised on a high base with a long arcaded gallery and a double staircase with white balustrades; the machine house with its tall brick chimney behind; a gable bearing a monogram and the date January 1907; two churches, one of them colonial; the casa de raya; and ruins of a cantina, a mill and stables. There are also pre-Hispanic remains on the land: in the 1870s the explorer Augustus Le Plongeon described a large quadrangular Maya building here that he likened to the Nunnery at Uxmal. The hacienda is private and has no regular visiting hours, so ask before going in; its patron saint, San José, is celebrated on 19 March, and the Immaculate Conception on 8 December.