Kantoyná

Kantoyná is a comisaría of Conkal municipality, about 4 km north of the town of Conkal and roughly 20 km from central Mérida. The name comes from Yucatec Maya. It is one of three former haciendas in the municipality, together with Xcuyún and Santa María Rosas, and at the 2005 census it had 133 inhabitants, almost evenly split between men and women.

Like most estates near Mérida, Kantoyná was a henequen hacienda, where the leaves of the agave were cut and their fibre extracted for cordage and other products. After the agrarian reform decreed by President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1937, the fields became an ejido, the communally owned land of the villagers, while the hacienda core, the casco, stayed in private hands. The old railway line from Chicxulub Pueblo ran to Kantoyná, and its route survives as a country track.

The village is a handful of quiet lanes around the casco: a red main house with a deep veranda of square pillars, an old brick chimney from the machine house, dry-stone walls, and rows of henequen plants along the roadsides. There is a small square with the comisaría building, a primary school and two small Catholic churches. The casco is private and there are no visitor services, so Kantoyná is a place to look at from the street on a drive around the haciendas north of Mérida.