Kancabchén Ucí

Kancabchén Ucí is a small settlement and former hacienda in Motul municipality, about 9 km in a straight line north-northeast of the town of Motul, which is some 45 km from Mérida along Highway 176. It is one of several places in Yucatán called Kancabchén. The name is Maya: kancabchén is usually translated as 'the well of the red earth', and Ucí means seven, giving roughly 'the seventh well of the red earth'.

The estate arose during the 19th-century henequen boom. Early records name its owner as Benita Palma Barroso de Campos, who inherited eight haciendas from her husband, Roque Jacinto Campos Marrufo. After President Lázaro Cárdenas's agrarian reform of 1937, the henequen fields became ejidos and the former owners kept 150 hectares as private property. Henequen was grown here until the 1950s; then the estate closed and its machinery sat idle until the 1980s, when a Mérida businessman bought part of it, planted trees and used the old factory equipment to process limes.

Lime harvests began in the 1990s and went well until a hurricane wiped out the 2002 crop. In 2003 Coca-Cola bought the estate and replanted it with lime trees, which first bore fruit around 2010. The community has always been small: 126 people in 1900, 233 in 1910 and fewer than 110 ever since, with 96 at the 2005 census. Today the hacienda house is a private family home in the middle of a working lime plantation, and the village has a small main park. The place is quiet and remote; the last 4 km from the road can only be covered on foot or by bicycle.