Maxcanú

Maxcanú is a town of about 14,000 people (13,965 in the 2020 census) in western Yucatán, the seat of a large municipality that reaches west to the Campeche border. It sits on Federal Highway 180, about 62 km south of Mérida, and it is the natural base for the Maya city of Oxkintok and the Calcehtok caves, just to the east, and the vast, little-visited ancient city of Chunchucmil, about 25 km west. The Maya name is read in different ways, as "the beard of Kanul" (Kanul being a family name) or "his four monkeys".

Before the conquest the area belonged to the Ah Canul chiefdom. In 1734 the encomienda of José Domingo Pardío counted 256 Maya tributaries here. During the tensions that led to the Caste War, in 1847, the state government set up whipping posts at the entrance to town to punish Maya suspected of conspiracy, the local cacique among them. Maxcanú was a villa by 1900, was declared a city on 28 April 1914 only to have the decree reversed, and lost Kopomá, which became a municipality of its own, in 1935. The anthropologist Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, chief editor of the great Cordemex Maya dictionary, was born here.

The parish church of San Miguel Arcángel dominates the centre with its tall, battlemented red-ochre front; Spanish-language Wikipedia notes that the 90° west meridian runs through its tower. The state government also lists a 17th-century church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen and the chapel of the Tres Cruces among the town's monuments. On the town square, the arcaded green municipal palace with its clock tower faces streets busy with tricycle taxis, and women sell seeds and produce at the market. The shaded main square is bigger than Mérida's Plaza Grande, a white plaque marks Alfredo Barrera Vásquez's birthplace, and a long staircase climbs to a small hilltop chapel with a view. On the outskirts, the decaying Hacienda Chan Chocholá has odd French-style towers with slate roofs. The farms around town grow jícama, maize, habanero chiles, aloe and Maradol papaya. Maxcanú has a bus station with services to Mérida and Campeche, combis to the surrounding villages, and a Tren Maya station just outside town.