San Antonio Tzacalá

San Antonio Tzacalá, usually just Tzacalá, is a comisaría of Mérida municipality about 28 km south of the city centre. Petac lies to its north. The village had 715 inhabitants in the 2020 census. Its name joins Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron, with the Maya Tzacalá, read as "wheel woven of vine and basil".

Tzacalá grew around a henequen hacienda whose large buildings still stand, though in ruins. The main house stands on a raised platform reached by a broad flight of steps, with a portico of slender columns across its front; inside, traces of painted decoration with stencilled flowers and borders survive on the walls. Across a wide open green rise the long, arched walls of the machine house and a tall brick chimney, and a crumbling stone gateway stands by the road. Photographs from 2012 show the buildings abandoned and partly roofless.

The village itself is small, with a yellow-and-red casa comisarial, a small church with a pointed gable beside the hacienda walls, two parks, a kindergarten, a primary school, a telesecundaria and a cemetery. For anyone interested in Yucatán's henequen history, the hacienda ruins can be seen from the village streets; they make a good stop on a drive through the hacienda villages south of Mérida, together with Texán Cámara, Yaxnic and Dzoyaxché.