Quinta Montes Molina is one of the few mansions on Paseo de Montejo that’s still family-owned, still filled with original furniture, and still feels like a house someone just stepped out of—maybe to check on how lunch is coming along.
The house was built in 1906 by Don Aurelio Portuondo y Barceló, a Cuban businessman who came to Mérida to oversee the completion of the city's opera house. He liked the results so much that he hired the same architects to design his own home—a symmetrical confection of imported wood, Baccarat chandeliers, and Beaux-Arts ambition. He married into the local elite and named the house Villa Beatriz after his first daughter, settling comfortably into life among Mérida’s millionaire class flush with profits from the henequén trade.
Then came the Revolution and, with it, a one-way ticket back to Havana for Don Aurelio and his family in 1915. They weren't alone. Many wealthy families in Mexico—especially those with foreign ties—were eager to liquidate assets and leave quietly. But offloading a grand estate like Villa Beatriz couldn't have been easy. The house sat empty for four years until it was purchased by an up-by-his-bootstraps young entrepreneur named Don Avelino Montes Linaje.
Avelino had arrived in Mérida from Spain as a teenager and worked his way up from store clerk to one of the region’s most influential businessmen. His marriage to María Molina Figueroa, daughter of a former governor, linked him to one of Yucatán’s most powerful families. From then on, the house was theirs.
A century later, the Montes-Molina presence is strong. Each room is steeped in family memory, not just period drama. In the music room, a rosewood Steinway from New York sits beside a lyre-shaped guitar from Barcelona. The walls are washed with light from beveled glass windows—an architectural indulgence in a city where most rooms are kept dark to survive the heat.
Upstairs, in what was once Avelino’s bedroom, there’s a Spanish barueño—a travel desk that folds open like a puzzle box, once used to store contracts, chess sets, and anything else a businessman needed on long sea voyages. Avelino could catch the evening breeze from his terrace while sipping on his afternoon café con leche or an icy horchata.
Other bedrooms belonged to daughters, sons, and eventually granddaughters. One room—Chichi's—was used by the current owner's grandmother, who preferred sleeping in a hammock instead of a bed, as most native Yucatecans still do. The preference is practical. Hammocks are cooler and cleaner. Even the grandest bedrooms here have sturdy wall hooks to hang them. Just another way that elegance in Mérida has always bent to the heat.
The basement is a whole different world, though still beautiful. It was quiet during my visit, but signs of activity were everywhere—the dumbwaiter system, wood-fired stoves, and sewing machines that once turned out fancy dresses and embroidered linens. Believe it or not, the giant laundry basins are still in use. White linens are boiled, scrubbed with sosquil (a coarse natural fiber made from henequén), and dried fabrics in the fierce Yucatán sun.
What’s now a tiled family dining room was once a dedicated pastry kitchen, used to make pan de yema and pan de leche—local sweet breads served with water-based chocolate as a treat in the afternoon, a tradition that lasted well into the 1980s. The cocoa was roasted and ground in-house, pressed into disks, and stored in the basement until snack time.
This layering of function and memory makes the house feel like more than a museum. It was lived in, loved, and—until recently—used daily. Even now, the family visits. The owner's childhood dolls rest on the bed in one room, her photo as a girl sits on a desk in another.
Quinta Montes Molina doesn’t just preserve Mérida’s elite past—it humanizes it. The formality is there, sure, in the chandeliers and formal portraits. But so is the sweat, the bread, the hammock. It’s a house that still remembers how people actually lived.
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