San Pedro Chacabal

Roughly 10 km east-northeast of Motul in direct distance, San Pedro Chacabal belongs to that municipality, whose seat lies about 42 km east of Mérida. The village occupies flat ground some 6 metres up, in the former henequen region of northern Yucatán. Its name brings together San Pedro, Saint Peter, and chacabal, a word of Maya origin. If the town of Motul is included, it ranks seventh in the municipality by population.

Where several of Motul's old hacienda villages have lost people, this one keeps gaining them. There were 135 inhabitants in 1900 and only a little over 100 in the 1920s and 1930s. From the middle of the century the numbers rose without a break: 268 in 1960, 536 in 1990, about 660 in both 2000 and 2005, and 922 in 2020, split evenly into 461 men and 461 women.

San Pedro Chacabal has a main church and a comisaría building that houses the local authority. Structures and stone walls from its former hacienda survive both inside the village and on its outskirts. With no tourist facilities, a quick visit is enough, ideally as part of a drive through the farmland east of Motul that can take in Kancabchén Ucí to the northwest, a former hacienda that is now a lime plantation. In Motul, the municipal seat, there is San Juan Bautista, a church dating from the 17th century, and the museum set up in Felipe Carrillo Puerto's birthplace.