Hopelchén
"The doorway was a mouth. I stood in front of it for a while before going in, which felt like the appropriate response."
I had read about the Chenes-style Maya sites of central Campeche in a way that suggested they were less visited than the northern Yucatán sites, which is a reasonable inference and an understatement. Chichén Itzá receives several thousand visitors a day. Hochob, the most accessible of the Chenes sites outside Edzná, received me, two researchers from the INAH who were eating lunch under a tree, and nobody else.
Hopelchén is the town you base from, if you’re coming to the Chenes region. It is a straightforward municipal center — plaza, church, market, the basic administrative and commercial infrastructure of a regional seat in a state that is not on the main tourist circuit. What makes it interesting is the combination of things that do not obviously belong together: Maya cultural heritage, Mennonite settlers, and the most serious honey production I have encountered in Mexico.
The Chenes Sites and the Mask Facades
Chenes-style architecture, developed by Maya builders in what is now central Campeche roughly between 600 and 900 CE, has one characteristic that distinguishes it from every other architectural tradition I have spent time thinking about: the entire building facade is a face. Not decorated with faces, not incorporating a face as an element. The facade of a Chenes temple is a single enormous mosaic mask, assembled from hundreds of individually carved limestone pieces, covering the entire front surface of the structure. The doorway is the open mouth.
The faces are generally identified as Itzamná, the Maya sky deity, or sometimes as the rain god Chaac. I have read the archaeological arguments and find them partially convincing. What the structure communicates functionally — the experience of approaching a building whose entrance is a giant open mouth — is not dependent on the iconographic identification. You feel something before you understand anything.
Hochob is about 40 kilometers from Hopelchén on a road that is paved to a point and then not. The final stretch requires patience and a reasonable ground clearance. I drove it on a weekday and arrived to find the site in a state of dignified, semi-maintained isolation — the main structure cleared, the surrounding jungle kept back from the primary structures, but the site clearly not receiving the resources or attention of the major Yucatán sites. This is partly a problem and partly what makes it remarkable to visit.
The Honey of the Chenes
Campeche produces some of the finest multifloral honey in Mexico, and the Chenes region is at the center of it. The ecology of the Yucatán Peninsula — the flowering trees and plants of the tropical dry forest that covers this part of Campeche — produces nectar of a complexity that monofloral honey from agricultural regions cannot match. The bees work a range of species that changes season by season, and what ends up in the jar is the cumulative record of that.
The honey at the Hopelchén market was sold without ceremony from a stall where several varieties were arrayed in unlabeled glass jars. The vendor offered me a small spoon for tasting, which is the correct way to buy honey — you taste it first. The multifloral from the dry forest had a quality I can describe only approximately: floral and slightly herbal and not quite like any honey I have bought in France or anywhere else in Mexico, with a slight resinous note at the end that I suspected was from the copal trees that grow throughout the region.
I bought a jar with no label. It was a reasonable price. It was very good.
Mennonites and the Dairy that Appeared From Nowhere
The Mennonite community in the Hopelchén area arrived in the 1980s, part of the broader Mennonite migration pattern in Mexico — communities that had settled in Chihuahua in the mid-20th century subsequently sent colonies to other states as land became scarce. The Campeche Mennonite settlements farm in the characteristic way: systematic, efficient, visually distinctive from the surrounding ejido agriculture.
What this means practically for the visitor is that there is cheese. Mennonite dairy operations in Mexico have been producing a mild yellow cow’s milk cheese — firm, slightly nutty, sold by the wheel or the slice — for long enough that it has become identified with the communities and sold regionally. In Hopelchén I found it at the market from a truck that had driven in from one of the colonies.
The cheese is nothing like the aged cheesemaking traditions of France, and it is not trying to be. It is a practical cheese, a cheese that you can identify by its good faith relationship with the milk it was made from. I bought a wedge and ate some with the honey and some with the bread I had brought, sitting in the truck outside the market, and felt that I had assembled a reasonable lunch from things that did not obviously belong together.
Getting There
Hopelchén is about 100 kilometers southeast of Campeche City, roughly 1.5 hours by road. Buses connect it to Campeche City and to Mérida. For the surrounding Maya sites — Hochob, Dzibilnocac, Tabasqueño — you need a vehicle; the roads are unpaved and require time and patience but not four-wheel drive. The sites are administered by INAH and charge small entrance fees. The market is liveliest on Saturdays. Come with time to wander both the town and the surrounding country — the Chenes region rewards unhurried exploration more than a checklist approach.