Hacienda Yaxcopoil

Hacienda Yaxcopoil stands beside Highway 261, the road from Mérida to Uxmal, at kilometer 220 in the village of the same name, part of Umán municipality about 35 km south of Mérida. The Maya name means "place of the green poplars", and one of those trees still grows in front of the house. The estate goes back to the 17th century and spans three eras: the Maya settlement that came before it, the colonial cattle ranch, and the henequen plantation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Donaciano García Rejón and his wife Mónica Galera bought it in 1864, and it has passed down through their family ever since. At its largest it covered more than 11,000 hectares; today less than 3 percent of that remains.

What makes Yaxcopoil worth a stop is that it has been preserved rather than renovated. You enter through a double Moorish-style arch, probably built around 1800, that is one of the best-known images of the Yucatán haciendas. The main house keeps its high-ceilinged salons, wide corridors and original European furniture, with oil portraits of the 1864 owners, the estate office with its books, maps and papers, the dining room and kitchen, and an oratory with a colonial painting where San Gerónimo de Yaxcopoil, the patron saint, is venerated. The henequen plant still holds its machinery, including a 100-horsepower German Körting diesel engine from 1913 that ran until 1984, when fiber production stopped. The workshop facade carries four female figures representing the seasons, made by a Barcelona pottery firm, and a water wheel with early 20th-century American pumps still lifts water.

A small room called the Cuarto Maya shows pottery and sculpture from the Classic period (250–900 AD) found in the Maya ruins on the property, which spread over about 8 square kilometers of bush with six main pyramids between 6 and 20 meters high, a ball court and stelae. In 2001–2002 a scientific project led by UNAM drilled a 1,511-meter borehole here to study the Chicxulub impact crater. The hacienda also rents out a guest house and is used for weddings and film shoots. Visits come with a guided tour in Spanish, and a printed guide is available in English and German; plan about an hour.