Casa de Montejo

Completed in 1549 for Francisco de Montejo 'El Mozo,' son of the conquistador who founded Mérida, Casa de Montejo is among the oldest surviving civil buildings from the Spanish colonial period in the Americas. Its Plateresque stone facade, carved by indigenous stonemasons under Spanish direction, depicts two armored Spanish soldiers standing with their feet atop the heads of subdued, bare-chested indigenous figures, a rare surviving colonial-era monument that displays the ideology of conquest with unusual directness on a building still facing Mérida's main square. The Montejo family occupied the house for generations, and later owners preserved the facade even as the interior was substantially remodeled in the 20th century. Today the ground floor operates as a small free museum, presenting restored period rooms furnished in late 19th- and early 20th-century style, along with rotating exhibits on the house's history and the broader colonization of Yucatán. The building's structure blends the original 16th-century stone shell with later interior interventions, and the facade itself has undergone conservation cleaning to stabilize the carved reliefs against weathering. Casa de Montejo remains privately owned, currently by a Mexican bank, which maintains the ground-floor exhibition as a public cultural space.