San Pedro Chimay

San Pedro Chimay is a village of Mérida municipality about 7 km south of the Periférico ring road, at the end of Calle 42 Sur on the road towards Timucuy, inside the Cuxtal Ecological Reserve. It had 1,012 inhabitants in the 2005 count, and it has grown up around the hacienda of the same name, named after its patron, Saint Peter, and a Maya word for a kind of acacia. The estate stood on the old camino real from Mérida to Campeche, which shaped both its architecture and its most famous episode.

Chimay is one of the oldest haciendas near Mérida, founded in the late 16th or early 17th century, reputedly by one of the conquistadors who came with Francisco de Montejo; the main house may stand on a pre-Hispanic platform. Like other early estates it began raising maize and cattle and later moved on to cotton, sugar and henequen. In the late 18th century it belonged to the Lara family, and in 1852 Juan Miguel Castro, the henequen pioneer who founded the port of Progreso, remodelled the house of his wife, María Josefa de Jesús de Lara, adding neoclassical and French touches and a new north entrance that turned the estate's face from the Campeche road towards Mérida. In December 1865, on her journey to Campeche, Empress Carlota, wife of Maximilian, spent the night here; the family received her with a small homage and later raised a chapel-monument at the mouth of a cave about 400 m east of the house to remember the visit. The hacienda later passed to the Cervera family, lost most of its land to the ejido after the 1937 agrarian reform, and in 1982 was bought by José Eduardo Seijo Gutiérrez, whose family uses it as a country home.

The house is known for its long arched corridor with decorated capitals, a pool fed by three wells connected to a cenote beneath the terrace, and a fireplace inscribed 'JMC January 1875'. To the left of the house, among large trees, the chapel of Saint Peter has a belfry with three openings topped by green and ivory majolica finials, a gilded wooden altar and a small choir. The estate became part of the Cuxtal reserve in 1993 and is a private home not open to visitors, but from the village you can see the red walls, gateways and tall chimney of the old henequen works, and Tahdzibichén and Xmatkuil are close by.