A Travel into the Past: Yucatan!

If you are venturing out on vacation, Yucatan is one of the better places to explore. Sand, sun, history, and culture all await you. Since there are so many different and interesting things to view while you are there, it is best to prepare ahead and know what you really need to check out. That way you’ll be able to stick to a little bit of a timetable and you won’t feel like you have really passed over on something whenever you get back home.

Recently–titillated by reports of glamorous little hotels opening in restored Yucatecan haciendas. Not only you would  seek out the hidden Yucatán, but you would do it in style. You’ll find forts, churches, bastions, and all kinds of ancient buildings to observe. Mérida is an easy shot: a 90-minute hop from Miami. With its low-rise colonial buildings and wrought-iron balconies, the city looks a bit like New Orleans. The resemblance is no accident, since the fiercely independent Yucatecans historically had closer ties with France than with Mexico City. The French influence touches everything from architecture to food–I find some of the best beignets this side of Paris in Mérida’s bakeries

But the city’s most impressive monuments are, expectedly, Spanish. The 1549 Montejo mansion, for example, has an extraordinary sculpted façade of sword-wielding conquistadors surrounded by bursts of children’s heads; now a bank, the mansion is considered one of the New World’s most important works in the flamboyant 16th-century style known as Plateresque. On the other hand, Mérida’s main church, the Catedral de San Ildefonso, with its eggshell-white interior of simple columns and coffered ceilings, is so austere that it could have been designed by Christopher Wren.

Mérida, I quickly discover, is a delightfully uncomplicated, safe city, with palmy plazas, secret courtyards, vibrant markets. I walk everywhere, except when I hop one of the many horse-drawn carriages–used by locals and tourists alike–to ride along the Paseo de Montejo through the city’s grandest neighborhood. Shaded by tamarind and tropical oak trees and divided by a landscaped boulevard, the Paseo is an architectural sampler of Beaux-Arts palaces, mosquelike mansions, and exotic châteaux. Some of the buildings appear to be abandoned and are in various states of disrepair; others have been restored as headquarters for banks and businesses.

The highlight is the beautiful Neoclassical Palacio Cantón, now home to the Regional Museum of Anthropology, a fine place for appreciating the richness and sophistication of Mayan culture. I marvel at delicate jade figurines, whimsical pottery, and pastel frescoes–all muted blues and pale peaches–that remind me of those of Minoan Greece. I wind up my afternoon with a pleasant meal of chicken tamales, thick french fries, and cold Montejo beer, just a block from the museum on the terrace of the Hotel Montejo Palace.

A short walk are Aké’s Mayan ruins, standing on an acropolis above a beautifully manicured lawn. Some of the structures may date as far back as 700 b.c. Rising from the main building are 48 four-foot-thick columns made of stacked stone slabs. As I climb the steep staircase, it strikes me that the Maya, a famously short people, seemed to design stairs for giants. From the top, you can see pyramids and other hulking mounds that have yet to be excavated. Above me, a glorious blue Yucatecan sky is filled with swirly cotton clouds that appear close enough to touch, and I only regret that I didn’t bring a picnic.

Lunch in the garden of any restaurant, in the nearby town of Izamal, turns out to be the next best thing. I graze on taco chips with bean and pumpkin-seed dip, spicy local chorizo, and excellent poc-chuc, a Yucatecan specialty of sliced pork marinated in sour orange juice and served with pickled onions and cilantro-tomato salsa. But the real treat is the town of Izamal itself. One of the most beautiful of Mexico’s smaller colonial cities, besides cobbled streets lined by yellow houses with elegant arches and doorways, Izamal has a spectacular 16th-century Franciscan convent, built on the base of an enormous Mayan pyramid. (The pyramid was razed “in the name of Spain and the True Church” by the notorious Friar Diego de Landa–the overzealous Franciscan who did his best to wipe out the history of the Maya by burning virtually all of their codexes.

You can’t pass up visiting Uxmal, a sprawling Mayan ceremonial center that flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries. One of Mexico’s “big three” restored Mayan sites, Uxmal gets fewer tourists than Chichén Itzá and Tulum because of its relatively remote location, a good 250 miles from the crowds of Cancún.

A triumph of architecture and landscaping, Uxmal has the look of a well-planned city, with each of its major building complexes set on a different level. Great green lawns and clusters of trees separate these neighborhoods, easier to appreciate is the massive Governor’s Palace. Six hundred feet long and crowned with an enormous frieze that looks like some surreal mansard roof, it is considered one of the best examples of Mayan architecture anywhere.  Uxmal is only one of many Mayan sites along the Puuc Route. Fifteen miles farther, the fat-columned, flat-roofed temple at Kabah reminds me of the Minoan palace at Knossos, on Crete.

It doesn’t matter what sorts of stuff you like to do, you can do them in one of many wonderful cities of Yucatan.