For a good stretch of our life in Mérida, my daughter and I lived in Yucalpetén, on the quieter west side of the city, far from the postcards and the Centro crowds. Two cats came with us — that was the whole household, the four of us — and most mornings the day didn't really begin until we'd walked over to Parque Bepensa.
If you've never been to this part of Mérida, here's the shape of it. Yucalpetén is residential and unbothered, the kind of neighborhood where you learn which dogs bark and which ones have given up, where the same man waters the same plants at the same hour. It isn't trying to charm anybody. And right in the middle of all that ordinary living sits this park, generous and green, and for a few years it was the center of nearly everything we did.
We went for the walking, mostly. Long, unhurried loops with nowhere to be. There's a little café, El Cafecito del Jardín, tucked into the park, and we'd land there for breakfast more often than was probably reasonable — the slow kind of breakfast where you order, then sit, then order something else because leaving felt like a waste of a good morning. I filmed there too. A fair amount of what ended up on my YouTube channel got its start on those paths, camera in hand, my daughter half-rolling her eyes at me.
A word on the name, since people ask. Bepensa is a Yucatecan name most people here know — the family company that, among other things, has long bottled and moved Coca-Cola across this part of Mexico. Parks like this one tend to come into being the way a lot of Mérida's green spaces do: some mix of city effort and private hands, a patch of land set aside and shaped into something the neighborhood could actually use. I can't tell you the exact year somebody first decided this corner of Yucalpetén deserved trees and walking paths and a fountain, but I can tell you it worked. The thing got loved. You can feel it in a place when it's loved.
The nature is the part I'd want a stranger to know about first. Iguanas everywhere — fat, prehistoric, sunning themselves on the rocks like they pay the property taxes. There's water in the park, and where there's water there's life: ducks and other waterfowl going about their business, and birds overhead in colors that still caught me off guard after years of living here. You'd think you'd get used to a flash of tropical color in a tree. You don't. Not really.
And then there was the snake.
I'll tell it straight, because my daughter is a witness and she will not let lie. On one of our ordinary morning walks I spotted something in the brush that I am fairly certain was an anaconda — long, thick, the kind of snake that makes your whole body do math very quickly. Any reasonable person would have backed away. Reader, I am apparently not a reasonable person. I'm the fool woman who walked toward it. Phone out, filming, while my daughter said every sensible thing a person could say and I ignored all of it. I got far too close for anyone's good. I have no defense except that I couldn't help myself. I had to document it for my own belief. If you'd like to see exactly how close — and judge me accordingly — that footage lives on my YouTube channel, The RyTreat*, along with plenty of gentler Parque Bepensa moments that won't raise your blood pressure.
Later, after we'd already worn our paths into the place, they built the
Nina Shestakova auditorium inside the Centro Municipal de Danza community performance center, and it gave the park a second life. Suddenly there were performances — music, dance, the kind of arts events that bring a neighborhood out in good clothes on a warm evening. It's a beautiful space. To watch a park you'd known only by daylight fill up with a crowd and a stage and sound — that was its own small gift.
Here's the part I've been circling slowly, not just for this blog but in my own heart, a very uncomfortable truth.
I love this park. It is one of my favorite places in all of Mérida, and I'm telling you to go. But I'm not sure I'll ever set foot in it again.
The last time we were there, we were having breakfast at El Cafecito del Jardín— our café — after dropping one of our beloved cats, Kitten, at the vet for surgery that morning. We were sitting at our usual kind of table, in our usual kind of light, when we got the news that she didn't make it. That she was gone. And there's no clean way to say what that did to the place. The grief didn't stay at the vet's office where it started. It walked back into the park with us and it sat down at the table and it never left. Bepensa holds all the good years and it holds that morning too, both at once, and I haven't found a way to separate them.
So that's the honest shape of it. A place can be one of the great loves of your life and also the place where the floor fell out. Both true.
But none of that is yours to carry. That horrible pain is mine. If you find yourself on the west side of Mérida with a slow morning to spend, go to Parque Bepensa. Walk the loops. Have the long breakfast. Watch for the iguanas and the birds, and — please — keep a sensible distance from anything large and slithering. Go and let the place be only beautiful for you. It deserves to be loved by somebody who can still walk in freely.
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If you'd like to wander Parque Bepensa with me before you go — the paths, the wildlife, that infamous snake — come subscribe to **The RyTreat** on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRyTreat
And when you're ready to tend to yourself — your spirit, your rest, your own quiet mornings — everything I offer for your spirituality and self-care lives at **blacklionbotanicals.com**. Come see what's there.
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**Planning your own slow days in Mérida?** A few things I lean on when I travel, passed along here:
- Flights into Mérida and beyond — Trip.com: https://trip.tpm.li/QGNHWPiT
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- Tickets and tours once you've landed — Tiqets: https://tiqets.tpm.li/7ARis1dv -
- Staying connected without the roaming headache — Yesim eSIM: https://yesim.tpm.li/3wUJFVCA
*This post contains affiliate links. If you book through them I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.*
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