Convento de San Antonio Izamal

Convento de San Antonio Izamal tickets: which one to buy

Izamal lies about seventy kilometres east of Merida, roughly halfway to Chichen Itza, and the convent is the reason the town appears on so many day-trip itineraries. Entry to the church and the atrium is free; a small museum and the evening light and sound show carry separate modest charges. Organised tours from Merida usually combine Izamal with a cenote and a visit to Chichen Itza, allowing about an hour here, which covers the convent but not the Maya pyramids scattered through the streets around it.

Travelling independently is easy: buses leave Merida several times a day and take about an hour and a half. The better plan is to arrive in the afternoon, climb the great pyramid of Kinich Kakmo at the edge of town while it is quiet, and stay for the evening, when the yellow town is lit and the convent show runs. Horse-drawn carriages wait in the square and give short tours of the centre at a fixed price.

Visiting Convento de San Antonio Izamal: what to see

The Franciscans arrived in the 1540s and chose the largest Maya platform in the town, the base of a pyramid dedicated to a god of the region, as the foundation for their convent, which was built between about 1549 and 1561. The friar who directed the work, Diego de Landa, is the same man who burned Maya codices at Mani, and the site carries both histories.

Climbing the ramp from the square brings you onto the old platform, now an enormous enclosed atrium lined with some seventy-five arches, among the largest atriums of its kind in the Americas, built so that crowds of converts could hear mass in the open air. The church at the far end holds the image of Our Lady of Izamal, patroness of Yucatan, a replacement for the sixteenth-century statue lost in a fire. Fragments of early frescoes survive in the atrium walls. Like the rest of the town, every surface is painted the deep ochre yellow that gives Izamal its nickname.

Convento de San Antonio Izamal opening hours and the best time to go

Yucatan is hot all year and hottest from April to June; mornings and late afternoons are the times to be on the open atrium, which offers almost no shade. The rainy season runs from June to October, with short, heavy storms that usually clear by evening. The feast of the Immaculate Conception on the eighth of December brings pilgrims from across the peninsula and a week of processions and fairs.

Pope John Paul II visited in 1993 and the anniversary is remembered locally. The light and sound show runs on several evenings a week after dark and projects the history of the site onto the convent walls. Izamal is quiet on weekday afternoons, when the coach tours have moved on, and that is the best time to walk its streets. Allow forty minutes for the convent itself and a full afternoon for the town and its pyramids.