The first thing you see when you drive into Oxkutzcab on a Friday is that you cannot park. The market has expanded into the streets for several blocks around the main plaza, and the vendors arrive before dawn, and by the time the rest of the town is awake the main street is already a dense corridor of stalls with no navigable gap for a car. I left mine three blocks out and walked in.
The market is the reason to come to Oxkutzcab. Not the only reason — the Puuc Route archaeological sites are within thirty kilometers and the city makes a genuinely good base for that circuit — but the market is where the city’s logic becomes clear.
The Orchard of Yucatán
Southern Yucatán has a different agriculture from the northern peninsula. The flat limestone shelf of the north, the one you drive across on the highway from Cancún, is thin-soiled and dry. The Puuc hills region is different: more elevation, different drainage, the slightly more complex soil that accumulates in the valleys between the limestone ridges. The area around Oxkutzcab grows citrus, mango, mamey, avocado, and several Yucatecan fruit varieties I had not encountered before coming here — a small sour orange used in regional cooking that is distinct from the naranja agria you find elsewhere in Mexico, and a lime variety bred specifically for juice content.
The market vendors are mostly Maya women from the surrounding villages. The citrus prices are what they are when you are a hundred kilometers from the consumer center of Mérida and not paying for transport or urban markup: the kilo of limes I bought for three pesos was not a special deal, it was just the price. The mangoes in season pile up in improbable quantities. The mamey — a large oval fruit with orange flesh that tastes like sweet potato crossed with vanilla — comes in sizes I had not seen in city markets.
Beyond the fruit, the market carries the produce of the surrounding villages: the small dried chiles specific to Yucatecan cooking, the dried squash seeds that go into pepita sauce, handmade tortillas that differ from the Mérida restaurant version in ways that are difficult to articulate but immediately obvious when you eat them side by side. There are also comals set up in the food section cooking cochinita pibil — slow-roasted pork rubbed in achiote and sour orange, wrapped in banana leaves — and by nine in the morning the smell of it combines with the citrus from the produce section into something that makes it genuinely difficult to think about anything else.
I had tacos de cochinita at a stall run by a woman who had set up four tables in the corridor between two larger produce stalls. The cochinita came in a small clay bowl, dark red-orange from the achiote, with a side of pickled red onion in sour orange — the specific condiment that completes the dish — and warm tortillas. I had three tacos and then three more.
The Puuc Route
Oxkutzcab’s other function is as a base for the Puuc Route — the circuit of Maya archaeological sites in the hills south of Mérida. Most travelers do this as a day trip from Mérida, which is possible but means arriving at the same time as the tour buses and leaving before the afternoon light. Staying in Oxkutzcab and doing the circuit over two days is a different experience.
The sites — Labná, Sayil, Kabah, and Xlapak — are smaller and quieter than Uxmal and use a different architectural vocabulary: the Puuc style, with precisely fitted limestone facades and mosaic decoration that covers entire upper sections of buildings in geometric patterns. Labná has a gateway I think about more often than I think about many more famous structures in Mexico. It is a freestanding arch — not quite like any European arch and not like the Uxmal arches — and it stands in the middle of the former city at an angle that frames the sky in a way that seems to have been considered.
The sites are fifteen to thirty kilometers from Oxkutzcab on a road that is entirely navigable in a regular car, and on a weekday after nine in the morning you can have some of them nearly to yourself. I spent an afternoon at Labná and Sayil with perhaps four other visitors at each, which is the correct density for thinking about what you are looking at.
Getting There
Oxkutzcab is 100 kilometers south of Mérida on Federal Highway 184. The drive takes about an hour and forty minutes. Colectivo vans run from Mérida’s central terminal, but having a car gives you the flexibility to drive the Puuc sites at your own pace and stop at the smaller ones that are difficult to reach by public transport.
The Friday market is the largest, but there is market activity on other days too, just smaller. For Puuc Route logistics, the sites are open from eight to five. Accommodation in Oxkutzcab is limited to functional guesthouses; Ticul, twenty kilometers to the west, has more options and is equally well placed for the archaeological circuit.