After the small wonders of Mayapán we headed to the Santa Bárbara Cenotes – a place I’d read about and had been recommended. Now I have to say I reckon we were spoilt rotten on our last trip to Mérida, discovering the wonderful Cenotes Hacienda Mucuyche – especially visiting so early in the morning, which…

Mayapán is around an hour’s drive out of Mérida, with our trusty driver José Luis whisking us from our downtown casa, through the outer barrios and out into the dead flat Yucatan jungle scrub that goes on and on, with little change of scenery other than the odd bend in the road, a dilapidated Hacienda…

There are some truly spectacular tropical flowering plants in our Mérida garden. No scent at all, but incredibly dramatic shapes and forms. They’re mostly Macaw-flower Heliconia and Shell Gingers in deep reds, offset by the vivid green of the palms and fruit trees.  There are also massive native trees such as the Mamey Sapote (Red Mamey) –…

In the year since we last visited Progreso on the Gulf Coast of Mexico a lot has changed. The Malecon improvements are finished and looking great (it was a dusty mess last year) – the roads are clean, paved and landscaped (young palm trees establishing themselves) and there are plenty of funky new restaurants that…

One thing that strikes you about Mérida is how people express their individualism  – quite often through their brightly coloured, sometime garish, sometimes ostentatious houses. The houses in the tightly packed inner-city barrios are largely the same height, but it’s the width and depth of the buildings that differentiates: some of them are really quite sprawling,…

Mérida, if you hadn’t realised already, is a pretty colourful place. Mind you, anywhere in Mexico is a riot of colour. But there’s something about the light here that makes colour particularly vivid. The yellows hum, the reds and pinks pop, the greens vibrate and the whites glare – but it’s also pastel tones on…

Our return to Mérida, exactly a year on, feels in many ways like coming home to our home away from home. It’s so very familiar, especially our colourful ‘hood’, Santiago, where familiar faces walk the streets and you’d swear nothing has changed. The characterful ladies at the local Tortillería in Mercado Santiago still acknowledge with…

We may have saved the best till last. The recently opened Museo Internacional del Barroco (2017) is quite simply breathtaking. It was designed by Japanese ‘starchitect’ Toyo Itō who was inspired by what he perceives as the three characteristic elements of Baroque art: Movement, Natural Light as Chiaroscuro and the Man-Nature relationship. The most striking feature…

There’s a truly wonderful and completely surprising museum in Puebla called the Amparo. It’s housed in a large 17th Century building in Centro Historico but, once you step inside, you’re in a far more modern world, a gleaming 21st Century glass atrium with light flooding in from a skylit roof and garden terrace. The Museo Amparo is…

In 1531, the invading Spanish authorities began a ‘trial Republic of Spaniards for Spaniards’ in the valley of Cuetlaxcoapan, naming it ‘City of the Angels’. The new city was supposed to show that a recently arrived Spaniard in these new lands of promise was capable of “self-sustainment without having to depend on the taxes of…