San Ignacio Tesip

San Ignacio Tesip is a small village of Mérida municipality in the farmland and low forest south of the city, inside the Cuxtal Ecological Reserve, a short way south-east of Xmatkuil and the state fairground. It grew up around the hacienda of the same name: San Ignacio refers to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and Tesip is explained as a Maya name joining 'te', place, with Sip, a Maya deity of the hunt. The community counted 329 people in 2005, up from a low of 66 in 1930; before 1937 the census counted only the families living on the estate.

The hacienda took shape during the 19th-century henequen boom, when the estates around Mérida turned their land over to the fibre then exported worldwide for rope and twine. The agrarian reform of President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1937 turned its fields into a collective ejido and left the owners a 150-hectare core, and since then the main house has been home only to the owner's family while the village grew around it. On 28 June 1993 Tesip became one of the seven haciendas, with Hunxectamán, San Antonio Tahdzibichén, San Nicolás Dzoyaxché, San Pedro Chimay, Santa Cruz Palomeque and Xmatkuil, protected within the new Cuxtal reserve, created to safeguard the area's haciendas, villages, a dozen minor archaeological sites, six cenotes and one of the city's water supply plants.

The hacienda reached a national audience as the 'Hacienda Castañón' of the Televisa telenovela Abismo de pasión, which was filmed there until its finale in September 2012. Today it is a private venue rented for weddings and photo shoots, with a red arched gateway, wide lawns lined with palms and the long main house at the end. For a casual visitor the village is a quiet stop on a drive through the Cuxtal haciendas: the gate and the village chapel are by the road, and Xmatkuil, San Pedro Chimay and Tahdzibichén are all close by.