The stones are coming up one by one in two of Mérida’s best-known old neighborhoods. Crews are cleaning, numbering, and reinstalling the pieces instead of treating the streets as ordinary pavement. The work is already changing traffic around San Juan and La Ermita, and city officials say the same heritage approach could soon reach other corners of the historic center. It is slow work by design, and the August target is still on the table.
Mérida lifts old stones to save the street beneath them
Mérida expects the San Juan paving-stone repair project to finish by the end of August. Crews are treating the street surface as heritage material rather than construction debris.
The work covers Calle 64 between Calles 69 and 73 in San Juan. It also includes Calle 64-A between Calles 75 and 73 in La Ermita de Santa Isabel. A June 8 project update put the current advance at about 30 percent. The city’s own press-room notice describes the work as part of a four-stage effort on Calle 64, starting from the San Juan park area.
Alfonso Esteban Arjona Santana, Mérida’s director of public works, said crews have already removed about 189,000 paving stones across roughly 4,000 square meters.
“We have already lifted all the paving stones on Calle 64,” Arjona said in translation.
Workers lift the pieces, clean them, number them, and store them. Then the stones are returned to the same stretch of street. They are also stacked and wrapped on pallets of 320 pieces before transfer. That explains why the job moves more slowly than normal resurfacing.
A heritage job with traffic attached
The nearly 13-million-peso restoration also includes storm-drainage improvements. Damaged covers, drainage grates, and uneven surfaces have already drawn attention in the Centro Histórico. Earlier coverage looked at hidden street hazards in Mérida Centro. Another recent report examined how trash and oils can worsen flooding pressure on storm wells.
City officials say they do not plan to keep every closed section blocked until the full project is done.
“We are not going to wait for the whole project to finish before reopening vehicle passage,” Arjona said in translation.
The first reopened section could come as crews finish reinstalling stones near Calle 71. The city has said it will open segments in stages, rather than wait for a single final delivery. That approach may ease pressure around the work zone. Still, the project will keep part of the historic-center grid under construction through the summer.
More old neighborhoods could be next
The project is not expected to stop with San Juan and La Ermita. Arjona said Santa Lucía and La Mejorada are already under review by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). Any intervention inside Mérida’s protected historic zone needs heritage approval.
“Both are in the approval process with INAH, and the idea is that this year we can intervene in Santa Lucía, while Mejorada would be next year,” Arjona said in translation.
That approval step is not a formality. INAH’s own catalogue of Mérida describes the city’s historic monument zone as an area declared in 1982. The zone covers 659 blocks and includes 3,906 buildings of historical value from the 16th through 19th centuries. It includes churches, former religious complexes, public buildings, and neighborhoods that grew out from the colonial core.
Mérida’s tourism office says La Ermita de Santa Isabel received the Barrio Mágico designation in July 2023, along with San Sebastián and Xcalachén.
