The Maqueta Payo Obispo is a wooden scale model of the city as it was in the 1930s — when Chetumal was still called Payo Obispo and consisted almost entirely of wooden buildings on stilts, painted in the soft pastels of British Honduran timber towns across the bay. Hurricane Janet leveled the original in 1955 and the city rebuilt in concrete, so the maqueta is the only easy way to see what was lost.
The scale model occupies a small purpose-built pavilion on the Boulevard Bahía and is free to enter. Each building is labelled with the family that owned it and the function it served. Half an hour is enough, but it gives the modern, slightly characterless city centre an emotional dimension it otherwise lacks. Open daily, mornings only on most days.