On the southern side of the Plaza Grande stands the Casa de Montejo, one of Mérida’s oldest and most emblematic civic buildings. Built shortly after the city was founded, between 1542 and 1549, it was intended as the residence of Francisco de Montejo “el Adelantado”, the conqueror of the Yucatán Peninsula, although he most likely never lived here. Constructed with stones taken from the former Maya temples of T’ho, the house asserted Spanish authority at the very heart of the new colonial city from the very beginning. Its façade, in the Spanish Plateresque style, is unique in Mexico. Take a close look at the finely carved reliefs, the vegetal motifs, mythological creatures and, above all, the armored Spanish warriors shown dominating the heads of defeated Maya figures. This display of power was so explicit that it reportedly unsettled the King of Spain himself, who feared that Montejo was presenting his authority as rivaling that of the Crown. Over the centuries, the house changed hands several times, remaining with the Montejo family until the nineteenth century before passing to the powerful Peón family, whose wealth came from the henequén trade. They profoundly transformed the interior, adding elegant salons, dark wood paneling, decorated ceilings and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the caryatids that now frame the façade. Around this heavily symbolic building, a persistent legend emerged. It is said that the sculpted faces, especially those of the warriors and the figures crushed beneath their feet, are inhabited by the souls of the defeated, and that on certain nights whispers or groans can be heard crossing the square. Others claim the house is marked by the excessive pride of its first owners, and that this ostentation explains the misfortunes that later befell the Montejo lineage. Since 2010, the Casa de Montejo has been open to the public as a museum, where its furnished rooms reveal the lifestyle of the Yucatecan elite at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This single building tells nearly five centuries of Mérida’s history.