Mérida, a white city that plays every night

Mérida was founded in 1542 on top of the Maya city of T'hó, and the colonists built with the stone they pulled down: you can still pick out reused blocks in the walls of the cathedral of San Ildefonso, finished in 1598 and one of the oldest on the American mainland. Across the Plaza Grande, the Casa de Montejo keeps a carved facade in which armoured Spaniards stand on the heads of the defeated, an uncomfortable document nobody has tried to soften. What makes the city easy to like, though, is not its stonework but its calendar. Something free happens almost every night: the Vaquería dance outside the Palacio Municipal on Mondays, trova in Parque Santiago on Tuesdays, the Serenata in Santa Lucía on Thursdays, and a Paseo de Montejo closed to traffic on Sundays for bicycles and food stalls. That boulevard belongs to the city's other era, lined with mansions built by families who grew rich on henequen, the sisal fibre that supplied the world's baling twine; among them is the Palacio Cantón, now the regional anthropology museum. On the outskirts, the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya lays out the peninsula's civilisation clearly enough to make every ruin you visit afterwards readable. Eat at the Lucas de Gálvez market in the morning, when the cochinita pibil comes out of the pit and is gone by ten; later look for sopa de lima, papadzules, and marquesitas folded crisp around cheese and cajeta on a street corner. Mérida works as a base for the whole state: the cenotes at Homún and Cuzamá, the haciendas at Yaxcopoil and Sotuta de Peón, Uxmal and the Puuc route, the flamingos at Celestún, and the long pier at Progreso half an hour north. Nights stay warm; November to February is the kindest stretch.