Hacienda Temozón Sur

Hacienda Temozón is the old estate at the heart of Temozón Sur, a village of about 670 people (2020 census) in the municipality of Abalá, roughly 35 km south of Mérida off Highway 261, the road to Uxmal. Temozón is a Maya name usually translated as "place of the whirlwind"; the "Sur" tells it apart from the town of Temozón in eastern Yucatán. The village was officially called Temozón from 1900 to 1980, Temozón Sur from 1980, and Temozón again since 2000, but most people and maps still use Temozón Sur.

The hacienda dates from the 17th century, when it belonged to Diego de Mendoza, a descendant of the conquistador Francisco de Montejo, and it was one of the region's most important cattle haciendas. Like much of this part of Yucatán, which lies in the old henequen zone, it later turned to growing henequen for sisal fiber. Census figures show how the estate shaped the village: 640 people lived here in 1900, at the height of the henequen era, and the number fell by more than half in the following decade. The tracks of the old estate railway still run out of the village through the bush toward Muna and Yaxnic.

After decades of decline the main house and its grounds were restored over two years and reopened in 1997 as a luxury hotel, now known as Hacienda Temozón, a Luxury Collection hotel. Its red-and-white buildings, arcaded porches, gardens and cobbled paths have twice hosted meetings between the presidents of Mexico and the United States: Ernesto Zedillo and Bill Clinton in 1999, and Felipe Calderón and George W. Bush, who held the arrival ceremony here on 13 March 2007, and walked the ruins of Uxmal the same day. The hacienda is private and works as a hotel, so it is mainly for staying guests; from the village plaza you can see the outer buildings, the entrance gate and the old railway.