Tahdzibichén

Tahdzibichén is a subcomisaría of Mérida municipality just beyond the southern edge of the city, at about km 5 of the road from Mérida to Timucuy, between San Pedro Chimay and the Periférico ring road. It lies inside the Cuxtal Ecological Reserve, the protected belt of farmland, low forest, haciendas and small Maya sites south of Mérida. The full name of the estate is San Antonio Tahdzibichén, after the patron saint of its chapel; the Maya part is usually explained as meaning something like 'very well written'. The village had 678 inhabitants in the 2005 census and has grown since.

The hacienda was founded in 1873 as a henequen plantation and went on processing henequen fibre into recent decades. Like the other haciendas of the region it lost most of its land to ejidos after President Lázaro Cárdenas's agrarian reform of 1937, which left the former owners a core of 150 hectares. In June 1993 it was one of the seven haciendas, together with Hunxectamán, San Ignacio Tesip, San Nicolás Dzoyaxché, San Pedro Chimay, Santa Cruz Palomeque and Xmatkuil, placed inside the newly created Cuxtal reserve. The hacienda proudly remembers that the singer and film star Pedro Infante visited the hacienda often at the height of his fame, and photos of him with his friends here hang in the main house.

The estate is entered through a red mixtilinear arch. The main house is plain, with four bedrooms, a hall, a sitting room and a dining room, and no original furniture; it is surrounded by large lawns and gardens with a citrus orchard at the back. The old machine house is a roofless ruin whose masonry walls still stand with the remains of the machinery exposed to the weather. The hacienda is run as a country house and venue for weddings, parties and photo sessions, so it is not open for drop-in visits, but from the road you can see the gate, the chapel and the ruins, and the village sits on the way to San Pedro Chimay and the other Cuxtal haciendas.