Valladolid, a pastel town over cold water

Valladolid is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes and sits almost exactly halfway between Mérida and the Caribbean, which makes it the most useful base in the interior and, increasingly, a reason to stay rather than pass through. It was founded in 1543 and moved to its present site two years later; the streets are low and painted in ochre, rose and mint, and the main square faces the church of San Servacio, whose entrance was turned to one side in the seventeenth century as a penance after a killing inside it. The Calzada de los Frailes runs south-west from the centre, a straight line of restored houses, workshops and small hotels, and ends at the convent of San Bernardino de Siena, built by Franciscans in 1552 over the cenote that supplied it; the facade carries a projection show after dark. Water is everywhere here. Cenote Zací is inside the town itself, a half-open cavern with a swimming ledge and catfish in the shadows; Suytun, east of town, is the one photographed from a circular stone walkway when a shaft of midday light drops through the roof; X'kekén and Samulá at Dzitnup, seven kilometres west, are fully enclosed, hung with roots and stalactites. Chichén Itzá is forty minutes away, close enough that you can be at the gate on opening and finish before the coaches arrive from the coast, and Ek Balam, half an hour north, still lets you climb its acropolis to a stucco frieze of winged figures around a jaguar's open mouth. Valladolid cooks dishes you will not find elsewhere: lomitos in tomato, longaniza smoked in the market, escabeche oriental. Buy an ice cream on the plaza in the evening and watch the whole town do the same.