The Beginning of Paseo de Montejo

The broad Paseo de Montejo begins at a small square called El Remate—“the ending.” This strange name remains from an attempt to extend the boulevard farther toward the center. The attempt ended right here.

In January eighteen eighty-eight, Yucatán Governor Guillermo Palomino gathered hacienda owners, industrialists, and merchants: they wanted to create a new residential district north of old Mérida, with a spacious public promenade. These people made money from growing, processing, and selling henequen—an agave whose fiber was used to make ropes. As long as global demand brought in money, they could invest in urban land and build homes away from the cramped blocks around Plaza Grande.

Gonzalo Peón, chairman of the committee that was formed, was to handle the purchases, while engineer Rafael Quintero was to lay out the street. The committee bought plots from eight elderly owners; seven of them were women. Quintero drew a line through the middle of seven existing blocks. So what stands before us is not an old road that was widened: people bought a strip of land and cut through the former grid of the city with it. Between the future homes, they laid out a central carriageway for carriages and riders, pedestrian paths, and two side streets.

On January twenty-sixth, the committee unanimously chose the name Paseo de Montejo. An adelantado was a person whom the Spanish Crown commissioned to conquer a territory and then govern it. Francisco de Montejo the Elder received such a commission for Yucatán and began military campaigns against the Maya. His son, also Francisco, continued the conquest and founded Spanish Mérida on the site of the Maya city of T'ho. The boulevard was originally named for the father: the minutes explicitly state that it commemorates the captain who carried out the conquest of Yucatán. Two bronze figures at the beginning of the street depict both Montejos—Francisco de Montejo the Elder, the Adelantado, and his son Francisco de Montejo the Younger.

The committee managed to buy the land and begin work, but then an agricultural crisis and a lack of government funding halted construction for almost ten years. Governor Francisco Cantón resumed it in eighteen ninety-eight, and his political rival Olegario Molina did not shut down someone else’s project but brought it to completion in nineteen oh four. The original backers’ gamble paid off: wealthy families began moving here from the old center and building mansions on the plots they had bought.

In nineteen sixteen, revolutionary governor Salvador Alvarado decided to extend Paseo de Montejo south toward the commercial blocks. For the new street, one block at its beginning was cleared of the previous development, but the work went no farther: the cost and complexity of cutting a broad boulevard into the dense center stood in the way. The cleared plot remained empty for almost eight decades.

Mayor Luis Correa Mena ordered it turned into a square, which opened on January fifth, nineteen ninety-five. That is how the unfinished carriageway became El Remate. On Saturdays, a stage and temporary stalls are set up where Alvarado had planned to lead carriages and trams toward the center for “Mexican Night.”