Hacienda Mundaca, Isla Mujeres. During the golden age of swashbuckling in the 17th and 18th centuries, the pirates who roamed the Caribbean would often vacation on Isla Mujeres and harbor their ships in their tranquil waters of Makax Lagoon. Locals thing that famous buccaneers Jean Lafitte and Henry Morgan buried their treasures in the powdery, white sands beneath a palm tree even nothing has been discovered. Isla Mujeres’ most notorious resident, Fermin Mundaca, was a slave trader who preferred to be regarded as a pirate; somehow a more respectable occupation. Of the countless yarns that has been spun about this colorful character, the most common is that he set a torch to his ship, renounced his lawless profession and build an enormous hacienda all for the love of an island girl, known as La Triguena, who never moved into the grand estate that Mundaca built for her, but spurned his attentions for the love of a poor, but honest islander. The self proclaimed pirate died, heartbroken and single. Mundaca’s epitaph reads: “What I am, you shall be: what you are, I was”. The hacienda has been partially restored and open to public.
