Kochol

Kochol, also written Cochol, is a village in the municipality of Maxcanú in western Yucatán, about 15 km west of the town of Maxcanú. It is one of the municipality's main communities, with 1,498 people in the 2005 count, up from 319 in 1900. The name is the Maya word for mosquito.

The village grew up around a hacienda that boomed with henequen in the 19th century. Through the 1800s it belonged to the Lara family; in the late 1930s Mercedes Lara passed it to her son Luis O'Horán Lara, who lost it to foreclosure in the 1950s, and the bank took it over. For years the main house was used as a warehouse by the rural development bank BANRURAL. Meanwhile President Lázaro Cárdenas's land reform of 1937 had turned the estate's fields into collective ejidos, and the community kept growing on its own. The state government lists the former hacienda of Kochol among Maxcanú's historic monuments.

The layout is the classic hacienda plan: a rectangular square with the main house, the chapel, the company store, the foreman's house and the machine house around it, and the workers' Maya-style houses beyond. The main house has deep colonial-style porches with arches on stone columns and a split pediment; the machine house is plainer, with a central double arch. The buildings have been described as neglected and uninhabitable, so this is a place to look at from the square rather than go inside. Kochol is also one of the communities whose ejido lands cover part of the ancient Maya city of Chunchucmil.