Komchén Martínez

Komchén Martínez, a hamlet and comisaría belonging to Motul, is about 7 km due north of the town of Motul if you draw a straight line, and Motul in turn is some 42 km east of Mérida. The ground here is flat and low, hardly higher than the sea, in the henequen farmland that covers the north of Yucatán. The name joins the Maya Komchén, 'deep well', to Martínez, the surname of a past owner of the estate that the settlement grew from.

Komchén Martínez has never been more than a handful of households. Census takers found 73 people in 1900 and 139 in 1910, then somewhere between about 45 and 120 through the rest of the 1900s. The count was 90 in 2005 and 112 in 2020, the lowest of any of Motul's named comisarías. Like so many villages in the region, it started out as a hacienda.

Everything is packed into one compact core: the church, the main park and the old hacienda. There are no tourist facilities, so keep the visit short and fold it into a drive around the quiet comisarías north of Motul, adding Ucí, a few kilometres south, with its ancient Maya causeway. In Motul, the municipal seat, you will find San Juan Bautista, dating from the 17th century, and the house-museum in Felipe Carrillo Puerto's birthplace.