The Paseo de Montejo is long, wide, and grand, suggesting that somebody (or several) had something to prove. And they did. In the late 1800s, Mérida found itself literally awash with cash from the henequén boom—green gold, they called it—and suddenly the tidy colonial grid of the old city didn’t feel, well, sufficiently braggable.
So the hacienda set laid the cornerstone in 1888 for a new boulevard stretching north from Santa Ana, opening the former municipal frontier for a mile-long parade of mansions, monuments, and self-congratulation. It wasn’t a street, it was an announcement that Mérida had arrived.
They named it after Francisco de Montejo el Mozo, the son of Francisco el Older and half of the conquistador tag team ordered to brutally subjugate the Yucatán Peninsula in the 1500s. His dad got the initial commission, Young Francisco got the glory gig of finally crushing Maya resistance and planting the Spanish flag in every corner of the region.
You can still find his statue near the southern end of the Paseo, surrounded by what I assume are his frat bros and posed with the smug authority only second-gen colonizers can muster. Apparently massacres and forced labor earn you a bronze horse in these parts.
The boulevard itself was finished in 1904, just three years after the Caste War officially ended. That brutal Maya uprising had raged for more than 50 years, a fact not lost on anyone reading the timeline and wondering how all this paving, draining, leveling, and tree-planting got done so quickly. The Maya did it. But Mérida was ready to show off, and questions about who exactly did all the heavy lifting were left out of the dedication speeches.
Today, the Paseo feels like an outdoor stage after lights out with the immaculate props left in their place. Two grand lanes of traffic, two wide pedestrian walkways, and a canopy of trees that do their best to shield people from the sun. The mansions that flank the boulevard were built to impress—French façades, neoclassical columns, ornate ironwork—the architectural equivalent of rich kids slapping each other on the back and shouting, “Well done, you!”
Some of the homes are museums now. Others are banks. More than a few are deteriorating wrecks, though just because they’re crumbling, many are still occupied. Which I discovered to my embarrassment that time I was called out by an old woman while I stood on her front porch taking photos. All of them are elegant question marks, reminding you how fast fortunes can rise and fall. The henequén boom didn’t last forever (thanks, plastic!), but marble is forever.
The further north you go from Junior’s ill-advised monument, the more layered the story gets. Midway along you’ll pass the monument to Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the socialist governor executed in 1924 for the crime of caring a bit too much about Maya rights, which, back then, meant at all. Further still is Justo Sierra, a liberal philosopher and education reformer cast in bronze, forever contemplating the tour buses idling nearby. And at the northern end, the Monumento a la Patria—a massive stone exclamation point that attempts to summarize all of Mexican history in a 1950s limestone version of surround sound. It’s spectacular, complicated, and not at all subtle. Just like the boulevard that leads to it. The ideological shift from conquest to conscience is baked right into the statuary.
We’ve never walked the whole thing in one go. You don’t have to. The story unfolds regardless. A roundabout here, a museum there, a shady bench where you can sit and squint at a mansion built by a man who imported his wife's bathtub from Europe. Twice. Because the first one sucked.
Paseo de Montejo wasn’t built for practicality. It was built to impress. And more than a century later, it still does. Even if the bronze men on horses no longer get the last word.
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