A week in Yucatán: ruins, cenotes and the drive between them

Yucatán is the part of Mexico that most rewards having your own car. The peninsula is flat limestone, the highways are in good condition, and the three things worth building a week around, Maya sites, cenotes and colonial towns, are spaced at distances you can drive before lunch.

The shape of the week

A workable route runs Cancún or Mérida in, then Valladolid, Chichén Itzá, a cenote day, Mérida, Uxmal, and back. Nothing on that list is more than two and a half hours from the thing before it, and most legs are closer to ninety minutes.

Resist the urge to add the coast in the middle. Tulum and the Caribbean side are worth their own days, but threading them between the inland sites turns a relaxed week into a driving one.

Chichén Itzá, and the case for the early start

The site opens at eight. The tour buses from Cancún arrive between ten and eleven. Those two facts determine the entire experience, and the difference between arriving at opening and arriving at half past ten is not a small one: it is the difference between a quiet archaeological site and a queue.

Staying in Valladolid, forty minutes away, makes the early start realistic. Staying on the coast does not.

Cenotes: the right counterweight

A day among ruins in Yucatán heat needs a cenote at the end of it, and the peninsula has thousands. The ones signposted from the main roads are busy and fine; the ones down a track past a village are better and require asking. Either way, take a towel and expect the water to be genuinely cold, which after a morning at a Maya site is the entire point.

Mérida deserves more than a night

Most itineraries treat Mérida as a stopover. It is the best city on the peninsula: a proper colonial centre, a serious food scene, and evening streets that fill with people rather than emptying. Two nights is the minimum that makes sense, and three is not a waste.