San Martín Rinconada, a feudal hacienda, is halfway between Puebla and Jalapa on the Jalapa route. The buildings are enclosed in a compound. The protective walls, 30 feet high, are in good condition—mellowed by age. Extensive cornfields surround the compound, which is about one half-block square.
An intricate grilled gateway opens to a plateresque church. The church clock keeps time, and the stone sundial by the corral also keeps time, hacienda time. Behind the church, a windowless chapel, with double doors for light and air, contains five mauled wooden desks, dusty benches of adzed wood, and a cracked blackboard. This was once a school.
Outside the compound, facing the church, are adobe huts roofed with straw. They accommodated the workers, their poultry, pigs, and dogs. Perhaps one hundred people lived in the twenty huts. A shingle-roofed pozo (well) supplies water for horses, cattle, and people, spilling it into a 20-foot wooden trough. Gun slots in the compound walls slant toward the well and trough. Zapatistas and Carrancistas threatened the hacienda in 1914; they banged on the residence door and demanded beef and saddle horses but left the property undamaged.
Now empty, the bedrooms are papered in gold and white and are semi-frescoed overhead. A minute patio, facing several bedrooms, has a few shabby cypress. The sala has no furnishings.
Stained-glass windows, humble panes of colored glass, light the auditorium that seated one hundred people. Behind a plaster life-size Christ on the altar hangs a dark red velvet drape; nearby, on the same wall, is a tortured Christus. A pair of prayer wheels stands by the altar. Chandeliers are encased in white covers, carefully tied. There are stubby oak candelabra with fat candles that have dripped wax. A foxed, framed letter is dated 1742.