☰Plaza Mayor

The central plaza of Merida, built over the Maya ceremonial centre of T'ho, is surrounded by the four major monuments of the colonial city: the Cathedral (begun 1561, the oldest in the Americas on the American mainland), the Palacio Municipal with its gold clock tower, Casa Montejo (built 1549 from stones of Maya temples — now a Banamex bank with free public access to the interior), and the Palacio de Gobierno housing Pacheco's famous murals of Yucatan's history. The plaza itself is in constant use: evening concerts, weekend craft markets, families on benches. Streets are numbered rather than named in Merida, which makes navigation rational once you understand the system: odd numbers run east-west, even numbers north-south.