Xcunyá

Xcunyá is a comisaría of Mérida municipality about 15 km north of the city centre, east of the highway to Progreso. It borders Tamanché and Santa María Yaxché to the northwest and Sac Nicté to the east. The village had 994 inhabitants in the 2020 census. Its Maya name means "hollow of the sapodilla", from xcum, a hollow, and ya, the sapodilla tree whose sap gave chicle. Not to be confused with the village of the same name in Tekax municipality, in the south of the state.

The village grew around a henequen hacienda, and the estate's buildings still stand around a broad green. The most striking is the old machine house, a long stone hall with a row of tall arched windows; the date 1906 is moulded into its gable, from the years when henequen made the estates around Mérida rich. A whitewashed arched gateway with small pinnacles marks the entrance to the hacienda grounds. Facing the green is the church, unusual for rural Yucatán: a slender, pale building with a tall pointed spire and a round window over the door, more like a small neo-Gothic chapel than the stepped belfries typical of the region.

In the bush around Xcunyá there are low stone platforms and mounds left by the ancient Maya. Village life centres on the green, with the small yellow casa comisarial and the water tower beside the church, a kindergarten, a primary and a secondary school, a library and sports fields. It is a quiet stop on a drive through the old hacienda villages between Mérida and the coast, such as Tamanché and Chablekal.