What’s next for Mérida’s mysterious Casa Morisca?
Eating dinner at a restaurant across the street, we kept noticing how many passersby stopped to take a photo of the unusual and beautiful building at Calle 51 and 56.
Built in 1909, Casa Morisca (Moorish House) has always stood out. After years of abandonment, its intricate details have been slowly and steadily restored over the past few years.
The fine details of Casa Morisca’s domed foyer appear to have been paintakingly restored, as seen in this photo taken June 2022. Lee Steele / Yucatán Magazine
Casa Morisca in 2023.Photo: Lee Steele / Yucatán Magazine
Casa Morisca, Mérida, Yucatánm 1909.Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In 2022, scaffolding was still installed at Casa Morisca.Photo: Lee Steele / Yucatán Magazine
While what’s going on now is still unknown to the public, its history is fairly well documented.
This residence was built by Genaro Pérez y Santos, a merchant originally from Pontevedra, Spain, to share with his Yucatecan wife María Alzina. He and his brother Federico, also a trader, along with José María Pino Domínguez, founded a carbonated water company.
The distinctive 24-room French-Moorish house was home to the United States Consulate in the 1920s and a maternity hospital in the 1930s.
According to one neighbor, scenes from the 1977 movie La Casta Divina were filmed there while it was in use as offices. Around this time, the famous Chapur family owned it.
It sat quietly, seemingly abandoned for years until a local architectural firm was hired to turn it into a hotel. The firm is no longer associated with the project.
In 1991, the architect Eduardo Millet Cámara entirely restored Morisca and sold it again in 2017. That’s when the slow-moving renovations and an extension began. Work on the new part of the building, which appears to be a hotel with underground parking, has lagged. Its lines are contemporary in contrast with the elaborate entrance.
In 2022, construction workers there told us that Casa Morisca would be offices, but we’ve also heard a restaurant would also be there, or maybe it will be a combination. That same year, I was able to walk through the open front doors and photograph the gorgeous foyer. Its chandelier was missing, but the decorative painting and stained-glass windows appeared to have been returned to their original glory.
Casa Morisca’s stained glass and extravagant arches reflect the Arabic influence that is seen in a few houses in the city of Mérida. It was built by immigrants with an obvious nostalgia for their Andalusian homeland, one local historian has noted.
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.
