San Bernardo

San Bernardo is a small village in the municipality of Kopomá, about 6 km west of the town of Kopomá and some 50 km southwest of Mérida. It grew up around a henequen hacienda and is the most important community in the municipality after the seat. It had 398 inhabitants in the 2010 count; the estate was busiest around the middle of the 20th century, with 907 people recorded in 1950. It was moved from the municipality of Maxcanú to Kopomá in 1940. The name honours Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

The hacienda prospered during the henequen boom, when Yucatán's agave fiber was shipped around the world. Like many large estates it paid its workers partly in its own tokens, redeemable at the hacienda store; San Bernardo's fichas, which name Miguel Peón as the owner, are now collected by numismatists.

Today the old hacienda houses the municipal museum, devoted to the agro-industry of the region, and the state government lists the former Hacienda San Bernardo among Kopomá's monuments. Around the wide grassy square you can see the estate's main gateway, an arched portal with pinnacles and a wrought-iron gate set in a long wall, a small cream-colored chapel with an open bell gable, and a niche with a statue of the saint. Old rails and the former train station on the edge of the village recall the railway that once served the estate.