10 km (6 miles) north of Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and 800 meters (half a mile) from Chetumal Bay, the ruins of a religious building complex stand amid the remains of what used to be a pre-Hispanic settlement known today as Oxtankah.
Dating from the first half of the 16th century, it is one of the earliest buildings erected by the Spanish in the Peninsula, as part of an initial occupation which was followed by a withdrawal from the region.
The Spanish village of Tamalcab, also known as Villa Real, or the Ruined Village of the Ruined Church, was founded in 1531 by Alonso Dávila, according to archaeologist Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer. The researcher Francisco Bautista believes that this village and the old Villa Real de Chetumal were one and the same.
It has been suggested that in the beginning the village of Tamalcab was made up of wattle and daub houses with palm-leaf roofs constructed around the Christian church. By 1582 it was recorded in the register of Peninsular churches.
The Spanish settlement was short-lived, and was abandoned owing to the hostility of the natives. Today, the only surviving part of the early Colonial site are the religious structures, which include the masonry open chapel and two annexes: a baptistery and a sacristy.
Cortés de Brasdefer mentions that archaeological excavations discovered a platform in front of the open chapel, on which there had originally been another chapel, with a roof of branches, and evidence of wooden posts around the perimeter to hold up the canopy. Inside the chapel there was also a masonry altar.
The building has all the features of a 16th-century church or monastery, apart from the branch-roofed chapel.
The church is laid out as a single nave with a barrel-vault ceiling. There are four entrances through the courtyard wall: two to the east, one to the west, and one to the south.
It is aligned east-west, as was the custom from the foundation of the first churches and monasteries in the New World.
Open chapels were an architectural solution developed by the friars in Mexico to the problem of attending to the large numbers of indigenous people they had to evangelize, so the building was designed to offer religious services in the open air.
Stones from the Mayan platforms on the site were used in constructing this architectural treasure. The first reference to this ephemeral Spanish settlement and the chapel was made by the American archaeologist Raymond Merwin, in 1912.
Oxtankah is the name given to the large pre-Hispanic settlement by the archeologist Alberto Escalona Ramos in 1937. The name alludes to the large number of breadnut trees (ox in Maya) surrounding the site, since the original name is unknown.
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