Wedding · Yucatán Haciendas
The sky as a ceiling
Hana & Jules
A full-estate buyout outside Mérida, a ceremony in a roofless chapel, dinner under the machine-house arches and a midnight cenote swim.
The brief
Hana’s family is from Mérida; Jules’s from Portland. They wanted the whole guest list under one roof, a ceremony with history and a weekend that introduced Jules’s side to the Yucatán properly.
What we did
A full buyout of a restored hacienda gave us 38 rooms on the estate, with the remaining guests in a Mérida hotel block and shuttles running every hour. Friday’s welcome dinner was cochinita pibil, cooked overnight in a pib dug in the gardens by a family from a nearby village, served with fresh tortillas and habanero salsa that came with a warning.
The ceremony was in the estate’s roofless chapel at the last hour of light, with the sky as the ceiling. Dinner moved under the arches of the old machine house, 110 seats at round tables, palm and pale peach florals against the ochre walls. At midnight the party walked with lanterns to the cenote, where a string quartet played from the cavern’s edge and about seventy people swam.
The detail people remember
On Sunday morning we took the guests who stayed to Uxmal with a private archaeologist, before flights home. Jules’s grandmother described it as “the best morning of my eighties.”
“My grandmother is from Mérida and cried when she saw how they'd treated the place. My husband's grandmother is from Portland and swam in a cenote at midnight. That's the whole review.”
- Photography
- Selected from Unsplash for this sample site
- Cuisine
- Cochinita pibil cooked in a traditional pib by a Yucatecan family
- Strings
- A quartet from Mérida's symphony
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