Sierra Papacal

Sierra Papacal is a comisaría of Mérida municipality about 32 km north of the city centre, west of the highway from Mérida to Progreso, on the road that continues toward Xtul and the beach village of Chuburná Puerto. It borders Kikteil to the east and Suytunchén to the south. The village had 1,556 inhabitants in the 2020 census; in 1900 it had 178. The name mixes two languages: in Maya, papacal is read as "mud of the magpies", from pap, a brown jay-like bird of Yucatán, and akal, sticky mud; Sierra honours the 19th-century Yucatecan writer and politician Justo Sierra O'Reilly.

The village is best known today for the Parque Científico y Tecnológico de Yucatán, a research campus of more than 200 hectares created in 2008 and inaugurated in December 2015. Research centres and universities work there, among them the CICY, CINVESTAV, ECOSUR, CIMAT, CIESAS and units of the UNAM, mainly in biotechnology, environmental technology and information technology. The park includes a botanical garden, a germplasm bank and a core library that stores geological samples.

The old village is small and quiet, built around a broad main square with a Catholic church, the casa comisarial and a baseball and football field. South of the village there is a cenote, a rocky opening in the limestone. To the west, along the road to Xtul and Chuburná Puerto, archaeologists have recorded minor Maya sites, and low stone walls and platforms can be seen in the scrub beside the road, together with remains of ranches abandoned in the 19th and 20th centuries.