A new home for St. Francis
Despite the fact that the Monastery at Conkal is one of the oldest Franciscan houses in the Peninsula – it was established in 1549 by Friar Luis de Villalpando -, the adjoining church dates from the 17th century. It is exceptionally austere, and the façade bears no decoration except a Renaissance-style carved doorway framing the entrance.
The simple main façade becomes lost in the vastness of the church’s huge dimensions.
Conkal is a town located just 16 km (10 miles) north of Merida. According to the Dictionary of Yucatecan Spanish, the name in Maya was Kumkal, from kum, meaning short, or hunched down, and kaal, meaning throat or the scruff of the neck, so that the full name would mean “place of the short neck”.
Building of the Monastery, the fourth in the Peninsula, began in 1551. It was dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi by Friar Francisco Navarro. In the 16th century, Friar Gerónimo Pat commenced construction of the church. He designed a three-nave building, with ashlar columns, as in most religious houses at the time, which substituted the original wooden structure with a roof of branches.
Work was suspended in 1650 because of a famine that hit the Peninsula as a consequence of a devastating epidemic of yellow fever that broke out in 1648 and lasted for four years. Friar Gerónimo died in 1653, and construction of the church was finished in 1674.
Friar Diego de Landa lived in the monastery at Conkal between 1551 and 1553, and in the following century Friar Diego López Cogolludo wrote part of his classic “History of Yucatan” here.
Inside the church, which has a series of side chapels, there are several distinctive altarpieces. That of St Anthony of Padua, dating from the 16th century, is one of the oldest treasures in Yucatan, Mexico, or indeed the American continent.
The ex-monastery was restored and rehabilitated in 2001 as a home for the historical archive of the Archdiocese of Yucatan, and the Museum of Sacred Art. And so, in the upper floors of this religious building from 1549, after four years of restoration work on the installations, the Gallery of Sacred Art of the Archdiocese of Yucatan was opened on the 8th of July 2016. Today there are six rooms exhibiting around 250 pieces, including sculptures, paintings, monstrances, ecclesiastical trappings, music books and other objects which bear witness to the historical background of the Church in Yucatan.
In what was originally the orchard, there is a saqiya well inside a vaulted stone kiosk, and at the end of the garden, a large structure used for stables and storerooms.The architectural beauty and the air of history pervading the monastery complex, dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Order of Friars Minor, or Franciscans, whose feast is celebrated on the 4th of October, can be admired during church services.
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