Paseo de Montejo

Paseo de Montejo is the long avenue that runs north from the Santa Ana neighborhood, just north of Mérida's historic center, toward the road to Progreso. It is named after Francisco de Montejo the Younger, who founded Mérida in 1542, and was laid out in imitation of the French boulevards, with a wide median, big shade trees and a string of roundabouts, each with its own monument. The first stone was laid on 5 February 1888 over the old royal road to Campeche, and the original stretch, 1,280 meters from Calle 47 to Calle 33, was finished in 1904 under governor Olegario Molina. Extensions followed in 1926, 1950 and 1979, so today the avenue runs for several kilometers.

The money behind it came from henequen, the agave fiber that made Yucatán's planters rich in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the families who grew it built their city houses here. Several are now open to the public. Palacio Cantón, built between 1904 and 1911 for General Francisco Cantón Rosado and designed by the Italian engineer Enrico Deserti, houses the Regional Museum of Anthropology run by INAH. The twin Cámara houses at No. 495 were designed by the French architect Gustave Umbdenstock and built between 1907 and 1911; one of them has been a house museum, Montejo 495, since 2021. Further north are the Quinta Montes Molina at No. 469, still owned by the same family and shown with its original furniture, and Villa Amira at Calle 39, a 1928 house that is now a free cultural center devoted to the painter Fernando Castro Pacheco.

The roundabouts mark the avenue's history. At the southern end, the Remate, stands the monument to the Montejos, inaugurated in 2010; the statue of the writer Justo Sierra O'Reilly from 1906 marks where the original avenue ended at Calle 33; an obelisk to governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto went up in 1925–26; and the 1926 extension ends at the huge carved Monumento a la Patria by Rómulo Rozo. Today the avenue is lined with hotels, cafés and restaurants as well as mansions, horse-drawn calesas ply it in the evening, temporary sculpture shows go up along the sidewalks, and every Sunday morning part of it closes to cars for the Biciruta, a free ride that has run since 2006.