Merida Mexico is a Beautiful Colonial City
Have you ever walked down a street, and thought “I wonder what this place looked like five hundred years ago? There aren’t too many places in the United States where you can, but travel south to Latin America and you find older cities thanks to the settlements of Spain. There are many beautiful colonial cities in the Americas. Spain had the money and time to build and develop permanent footholds throughout the Western Hemisphere. San Juan, Havana, Lima all are old and lovely, but no colonial center is as large as Mérida Mexico, capital of the Yucatán. The city of Mérida was founded in 1542, it was built on the site of the Mayan city of T’hó which was a major Mayan center with a large population and five pyramids. T’hó dates back several centuries before the Spanish came to the Americas. While the Mayan city had been largely abandoned by the time that Spanish arrived, its temples provided the raw materials that were used to build most of the main structures in town...