Monumento a la Patria

The Monumento a la Patria stands in the roundabout at the north end of the 1926 extension of Paseo de Montejo, where the avenue continues as the Prolongación, about 2.5 km north of Mérida's Plaza Grande. It is a semicircular wall of carved stone, 14 meters high and 40 meters across, rising from a round basin of water, and it is the work of the Colombian sculptor Rómulo Rozo, who carved it by hand from quarry stone brought from Ticul. The architects were Manuel Amábilis and his son Max. The first stone was laid on 7 March 1945, and President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines inaugurated it on 23 April 1956.

Rozo, born in Colombia in 1899, settled in Mexico in 1931 and came to Mérida from Mexico City in the early 1940s, invited by the state government to teach sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. He spent more than a decade on the monument, and when he died in Mérida in 1964 his remains were placed in a crypt beneath it; his signature is carved at the base of the columns by the ramps. The style mixes Art Deco with the neo-Maya and indigenist currents of the time, and he described it as an altar to a homeland shared by everyone, meant to counter Yucatán's old separatist feeling.

The front, facing the avenue, is dominated by a kneeling woman with Maya features and a shell and jade necklace, holding a staff with the Mexican flag; at her feet are Mérida's coat of arms and a Maya house with a burning hearth, and two jaguar warriors flank her. The curving inner walls carry a procession of more than 300 figures, from the founding of Tenochtitlan through Independence, the Reform, the Niños Héroes and the Revolution. On the north side, facing away from the center, the eagle devouring a serpent on a nopal sits above a sacred ceiba, with the basin standing for Lake Texcoco, and 31 small columns represent the country's states and territories of the time. In 2016 the monument was named one of Mérida's cultural treasures. It is busiest on Sunday mornings, when the Biciruta turns around here, and is lit up at night.