San Antonio Tehuitz

San Antonio Tehuitz is a village in Kanasín municipality, about 5 km southeast of the city of Kanasín and some 15 km from central Mérida. The first part of the name honours Saint Anthony of Padua; Tehuitz comes from Maya. At the 2005 census it had 732 inhabitants, 374 men and 358 women.

The village grew up around a henequen hacienda that had its heyday during the henequen boom. Its core included a main house, a machine house where the fibre was extracted, a church and a workshop. Like many Yucatán estates, Tehuitz issued its own tokens; one surviving token, decorated with a henequen plant, was good for one mecate (a land measure) of weeding. Henequen is not entirely gone: the municipality still lists a decorticating plant for henequen fibre at San Antonio Tehuitz. The village also had a station on the old railway, whose ruined buildings stand a short way from the centre.

Today the centre of the village is a small square with a yellow church with a belfry, and a bright yellow arched gateway, painted blue at the edges, that marks the old entrance to the hacienda. Behind it, dry-stone walls, a tall chimney and roofless outbuildings are half hidden in the trees. There are no visitor services; it is a short detour south of Kanasín for anyone interested in the old haciendas around Mérida.