Chicharra Festival Celebrates 8 Years in Colorful Xcalachén
There is a neighborhood in the south of Mérida where the smell of fried pork has drawn people for more than 70 years. Xcalachén — now officially one of the city’s three Barrios Mágicos — built its identity around a single dish: chicharra, a Yucatecan specialty that bears only a passing resemblance to the chicharrón found elsewhere in Latin America.
Where chicharrón is a snack, chicharra is a meal. Fried pork belly, skin, organ meats, and castacán — pork belly with skin, cooked until golden — arrive on a plate or in a taco alongside habanero, bitter orange, shredded cabbage, and black beans. Order it surtida and you’ll get organ meats in the mix as well. It’s rich, unapologetically so, and deeply rooted in the working-class life of the barrio.
The tradition traces back to 1950, when Manuel Rodríguez Sierra and his wife, Elda María Valdéz, opened a chicharronería called El Rey David on Calle 95. That business is long gone, but it seeded a cluster of family-run shops that turned Xcalachén into the go-to destination for the dish across the city. Today, vendors including La Lupita, El Amigo, La Flor de Xcalachén, Chicharronería Cauich, and El Roble keep that tradition going.
In 2017, city officials and neighborhood vendors turned that history into a festival — a block party built around food, music, and the kind of street-level civic pride that tends to outlast any municipal program. It worked. By the third edition, organizers were reporting more than 10,000 visitors and two tons of pork sold in a single afternoon. The event paused during the pandemic but returned in 2025, and Xcalachén’s growing profile — including a designation as a Barrio Mágico and a wave of large-scale murals commissioned for the neighborhood — has only added to its draw.
The 8th edition takes place Saturday, May 16. The neighborhood is worth visiting any day of the year for its murals and chicharronerías, but the festival turns the streets into something livelier — vendors lined up along Calle 64, regional music, traditional games, and crowds that come from across Mérida and nearby municipalities. Admission is free.
Festival de la Chicharra 2026
- Date: Saturday, May 16, 2026
- Hours: Noon – 5 p.m.
- Location: Calle 64 between calles 93 and 95, Xcalachén, Mérida
- Admission: Free
- Tip: Bring your own container — organizers discourage single-use plastics
- Parking: Limited; street closures in effect around the festival route
- Participating vendors: La Lupita, El Amigo, La Flor de Xcalachén, Chicharronería Cauich, El Roble
Lee Steele is the founding director of Mérida-based Roof Cat Media S de RL de CV and has published Yucatán Magazine and other titles since 2012. He was Hearst Connecticut’s Sunday Magazine creative director and worked in New York City for various magazine publishers, including Condé Nast and Primedia, for over 20 years.
