Leaving Palenque meant another all-night bus journey, this time to Mérida. The earlier overnighter, from Oaxaca to San Cristóbal, had been a bit of a “horror trip” for me – one long, draining and unpleasant ride. This time, as we wheeled our luggage along the uneven pebbly road surface to the La Cañada bus depot, I was feeling much more sanguine about the bus trip ahead. Mérida was only 480-odd kilometres and (hopefully) no more than nine hours away, The road in Yucatán especially Highway 190D was better than in Chiapas and we were going away from the hills of western Chiapas where the threat such as it was to vehicles from the Zapatista rebels seemed to be concentrated. It also felt reassuring that this time I wouldn’t be doing the long bus trek solo.

Mérida: town planning by numbers!

On this occasion the overnighter did go smoothly and incident free, arriving at our new hotel in Mérida in just over nine hours. After a bistro breakfast of eggs and pancakes the only thing to do was slip on the joggers for an exploratory walk around the new territory. In terms of acreage I discovered that Mérida was quite a big place. After initially traipsing too far the wrong way away from Centro and finding f-all apart from a host of big international hotels, I doubled-back towards the historical quarter. Being short on the MXN folding stuff I spent much of the morning searching the local money-changers for the best deal before settling for a hole-in-the-wall tienda in Calle 55 that was offering 18-something for the USD*.

“Lovers’ double-handlers” – for Amantes gigantes!

The cambio de dinero was next to a cute little park called Parque de Santa Lucia. Here whilst buying some lunch I spotted for the first time a unique and endearing feature of the city’s parks…Meridians were big on these quaint “double-handler” seats or as someone described them to me, “the lovers’ seats the colour of white doves”💕: two U-shaped seats joined and facing each other to form a reversed ‘S’, so that the couple were diagonally positioned at a slight angle to one another. I later found theses distinctive seats elsewhere, especially in Plaza Grande.

Pasaje de la Revolucion

Scouting round the pueblo Viejo, the old town still has lots of wonderfully grand and dazzlingly elegant large colonial buildings, many with recent face-lifts it seems. As always in the Hispanic-speaking world the focal point of the city’s buzz was around the zócalo, the evergreen Plaza Grande, AKA Plaza De la Independencia (sometimes also known as Pasaje de la Revolucion)☿. On the cathedral side of the Plaza a line of brightly decorated horses and carts stood round waiting to catch the eye of visitors attracted by the prospect of a romantic, twilight carriage ride around antiguo Mérida. The carriage route includes a slow jog along the famous Paseo de Montejo (more of the Montejos below) which is lined with 19th century mansions.

Casa Monteja: stamping on the subjugated natives!

Museo Casa de Mantejo: The colonial boot-print
Museums are high on many visitors’ “to see” list in Mérida City and Plaza Grande is an ideal place to start a quest of the city’s history…and Mérida has lots of visible history, dating from 1542 – just 50 years after Columbus’s mis-discovery of India(sic). Museo Casa de Mantejo, directly opposite the zócalo on the south side was my first stop on the history trail. The 470 year-old mansion at № 506 Calle 63 is beautifully renovated inside with classy period furnishings, but it is Casa Mantejo’s facade that makes it most distinctive and most talked about. The Montejo family (the conquerors of Yucatán) started building the house immediately after the city was founded (it was completed in 1549) and it wears its ancient lineage in the weathered (albeit recently patched-up) character of the facade⊙. The unusual sculptural ornamentation surrounding the entrance is what marks it out for comment…two Spanish conquistadors armed with halberds stand – literally – on top of the heads of smaller figures, that of crushed down native Americans. The complete lack of subtlety of the carvings are a stark symbol of the absolute colonial power imbalance in force between the old and the new communities during that era. An odd assortment of other decorative symbols adorn the friezes of the entrance and the two front windows, including cherubs, monsters and demons.

Montejo courtyard

Special mention should be given to the interior courtyard of Casa Montejo. The austere fawn and white balcony walls of the mansion look out on to an attractive and tranquil setting – a central courtyard consisting of a series of fountains with a knob-ended cross design and native plants and bushes nestling round them.

Olimpio Cultural Center

Olimpo Cultural Center, Calle 61 x 62, Centro
I checked out two other museums also adjoining the Plaza Principal square. Heading back north from Casa Montejo I passed a couple of Dairy Queen stores catering for Mexican sweet tooths (DQs are almost as prevalent a sight in many Mexico cities as Oxxo stores) and came to a long, modern white building on the corner. This building, looking a bit like a beautiful but sterile government office building, had a lengthy corridor leading to an interior central courtyard that had a simple elegance in its all-white layout. Before I got to see the courtyard’s contents, a lethargic and apathetic looking official at the front desk made me sign-in to a visitors’ book (same as with Casa Montejo)❃. Upon entering the circular courtyard there wasn’t much to see other than space, freshly polished white and grey marble floor…and space! There was also nobody else there visiting at the time, so I was the only one looking at what was essentially blank space. This was not entirely true…inside the impressive arches of the patio were a scattering of exhibits of small colourful but unexceptional paintings, the sort you’d see in a community art centre or in a school exhibition…the abundance of unencumbered space reminded me, on a vastly smaller scale of course, of the famous Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and with even fewer exhibits than Bilbao!✧

Courtyard of Museo Fernando GPM

The Ateneo Peninsular building, Calle 58 x 60, Pasaje de la Revolucion, Centro
The third of the museums fronting the verdant zócalo – all of them gratis si se carga 🙂 – that I visited is on the cathedral side of the Plaza. Museo Fernando Garcia Ponce Macay is housed in a 16th century, light grey neoclassical building that bears the name “Ateneo Peninsular” chiselled into its facade. The Museo which specialises in modern and contemporary art is contained within a part of the complex that historically held an executive function, the Governor’s Palace. After you sign in at Security and stand in the courtyard’s decorative garden, you can get a glimpse of what is the best reason to visit Museo Fernando GPC. On the lime green and white walls of the first-floor balcony are murals that are part of the museum’s permanent exhibition.

Ateneo Peninsular, next to El Catedral

Castro’s ‘Conquista’

PostScript: Mérida and the Muralistas
The murals at Museo FGPC and the other enormous paintings of the same scale on display (strictly speaking not murals because they were not painted directly on to the wall) are part of a Mexican Muralistas tradition, and of course instantly reminded me of the great history murals of Diego Rivera that I saw in Mexico City. And like Rivera and the other Muralistas, the artist responsible for them, Fernando Castro Pachero, upheld the ethos that art should be publicly available, not restricted to the exclusive domain of rich private collectors. Castro’s mural works in the museum exhibit the very distinctive style of the artist – sombre and sparing choice of colours, monotone contrasting of dark and light, sketchily pencil drawn outlines of figures. The paintings of the battle scenes convey an almost claustrophobic intensity in the proximity of each side of combatants.

In a long, rectangular room of the former palace you can find the bulk of the Castro artworks on display, all painted between 1973 and 1975. Thematically similar to Rivera as well, the canvasses depict scenes from turbulent and bloody episodes of Mexico’s history – eg, the Conquesta, the Caste War, the 1860s overthrow of the imposed emperor Maximilian I, Gonzalo Guerrero (credited with parenting the first mestizo in Mexico). The Castro murals are well worth a look, especially as you won’t need to part with any pesos to view them!

Plaza De la Independencia (Zócalo)

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* after Oaxaca I had given up on banks as a source for Mexican currency…one frustrating, totally wasted morning in Oaxaca I tramping all over the joint, trying Scotia, Santander and even the non-Mexican HSBC, none of them would exchange my USD, all ridiculously insisting I had to open an account first?!?
☿ Mérida’s zócalo was one of the most picturesque public spaces we saw in Mexico, a veritable oasis of green palms, bushy trees and ferns erupting as it were out of a concrete foundation
⊙ in architectural terms Casa de Montejo is a civic Renaissance building in the Spanish Plateresco style
❃ entry to all three Mérida museums I visited was free of charge
✧ with more information acquired after my visit I would happily concede my first impressions didn’t do the OCC full justice…there is a little more to it than the sparse scattering of unexceptional paintings – the building contained a planetarium, showed films and had a beautiful outdoor arched balcony with checkerboard floors (not open when I made my visit)