Kancabchén

Kancabchén is a village in the municipality of Halachó, in western Yucatán, about 8 km northwest of the town of Halachó by road. Its Maya name is usually translated as "the well of the red earth", from kancab, the red soil of the peninsula, and chen, well. Several other places in Yucatán share the name, among them haciendas in Motul, Homún, Tunkás and Ucí, so this one is often written Kancabchén (Halachó).

Like much of this corner of the state, it began as a hacienda during the 19th-century henequen boom, when the agave fiber was Yucatán's great export. In 1937 President Lázaro Cárdenas's land reform turned the hacienda lands into collective ejidos, leaving the former owners a core of 150 hectares. Before then the census counted only the families living on the estate, 72 people in 1900; afterwards the community kept growing, to 421 in 2005 and 541 in the 2020 census. The spelling was changed to Kankabchén in 1970 and changed back in 1990.

The main hacienda house survives, but it is lived in by the owner's family, so it is something to look at from the road rather than visit. There are no visitor services in the village; Halachó, on Federal Highway 180, has shops, a market and buses.