Mérida (9)



Source: WTL photograph© taken on site in Mérida.
Notes: Here you see a nineteenth-century mansion built on the opulent Paseo de Montejo, Mérida's equivalent of New York's Park Avenue or Beverly Hills' Wilshire Boulevard. Much of Mérida's wealth until about 1950 came from the cultivation of henequén (sisal in English). In the nineteenth century, Yucatán was México's most prosperous state, and in the early twentieth century, Mérida possibly had more millionaires than any other city in the world. The architecture of this mansion is clearly of the nineteenth century with the observation tower and the pretentious Classical columns on the portico.