Ucí

Ucí is a village and comisaría of Motul municipality, a few kilometres north of the town of Motul, which is itself about 42 km east of Mérida. With 1,212 people at the 2020 census it is one of the larger comisarías of the municipality. The modern village, with its main church and comisaría building, sits on top of and beside the remains of a sizeable ancient Maya city of the same name.

Ancient Ucí was the western end of one of the four long-distance causeways, or sacbé, known in northern Yucatán. The causeway runs about 18 km east from Ucí to Cansahcab, passing the sites of Kancab, 8 km away, and Ukana; it is a raised stone road 5 to 10 metres wide and usually half a metre to a metre high, built with more than 100,000 cubic metres of stone. Archaeologists have long debated its purpose: one view is that Ucí was the capital of a small polity reaching to Cansahcab and built the road to hold its borders against Dzilam, while others think it served processions or trade. Rubén Maldonado surveyed the area between 1979 and 1982, and since 2008 the Ucí–Cansahcab Causeway Project, led by Scott Hutson of the University of Kentucky, has mapped and excavated the site and the settlements along the road.

The centre of the old city lies southwest of the present village. Its builders set their monumental architecture around five natural depressions in the bedrock, one of them reaching water through small caves, and used megalithic blocks with rounded corners, a style also seen at Aké and Izamal. The best preserved group is a platform 5 metres high and 77 by 72 metres across topped by an 8-metre temple, and nearby stands a pyramid about 12 metres high. Much of the site was damaged around 1950, when stone from the largest buildings was taken as fill for a road, and estimates put the ancient settlement at 7.5 to 11 square kilometres. What you see today are grassy mounds and platforms, not restored temples.