Santa Cruz Palomeque

Santa Cruz Palomeque is a small comisaría of Mérida municipality about 9 km south of the city centre, just beyond the Periférico ring road and next to the comisaría of Dzununcán. It lies inside the Reserva Cuxtal, the protected area the city created in 1993 to guard its main water source along with the old haciendas, cenotes and minor Maya sites of the south. The village had 1,237 inhabitants in the 2020 census, up from a handful of people living on the estate in 1900. Its name joins the Holy Cross, the patron of the church, with the surname of José María Palomeque, one of the estate's former owners.

The estate's history goes back to the colonial period: the property was a Franciscan holding in 1640, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries it worked as a henequen farm. As with the other haciendas around Mérida, the land became a collective ejido after the agrarian reform of 1937 and the hacienda's core stayed in private hands. The buildings were later abandoned; in 2007 new owners bought the estate and restored it.

Today the old hacienda is a boutique hotel with 25 rooms and suites in about five hectares of gardens enclosed by stone walls and shaded by large trees. The main house has stone walls 1.8 metres thick and arches high enough for horse-drawn carriages; the old machine house, where henequen fibre was processed, now holds a bar and reception hall, and its chimney still rises over the grounds. The chapel, badly damaged by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, has been fully restored with its old carved roof beam. The village itself has a yellow church with a stepped belfry, a park, a kindergarten and a primary school.