Sitpach

Sitpach is a comisaría of Mérida municipality northeast of the city, east of the highway from Mérida to Motul, between Cholul to the north and Chichí Suárez to the southwest. It had 2,226 inhabitants in the 2020 census. Its Maya name means "field of reeds", from sit, reed, and pach, a sown field. Sitpach belonged to the municipality of Conkal until February 1932, when a state decree moved it to Mérida.

The village is laid out around a wide green park. Beside it stand the church, a tall whitewashed building with a stepped belfry framed by palms, and the long yellow casa comisarial with its arcade. West of the village lies the abandoned Hacienda Sitpach, with its main house, a chapel and several lesser buildings. Close by, on the road between Cholul and Sitpach, are the decaying buildings of another old estate, the Hacienda Cancabchén Casares, which had 103 inhabitants in the 1900 census and is wrapped in local legends about its abandonment.

Sitpach matters to archaeologists. In 2011 the INAH announced seven previously unknown Maya sites in the ejido of Sitpach, named Oxmul, Polok Ceh, Cuzam, Chan Much, Nichak, Tzakan and Chankiuik, spread over about 1,000 hectares and found during salvage work ahead of Mérida's urban growth. At Oxmul the team found about 75 human burials with pottery, including polychrome vessels never seen before in the region. The sites date from the Late Preclassic, around 400 BC to AD 200, which supported the idea that northern Yucatán was well populated long before the Classic period. The finds are kept by the INAH in Mérida, and the sites are not open as visitor attractions.