Isla Mujeres' famous pirate

The Spanish pirate, who put Isla Mujeres on the map, Fermin Antonio Mundaca's started life in October 1825, when he was born in Santa Maria Spain. Little is known about his early life and studies, he claimed to be an Architect but there is some doubt about that, the feeling being is that it may have been a front for his criminal activities.

What is known is that he sailed from Spain at a fairly young age and started to make vast sums of money capturing and trafficking slaves to work in the Cuban plantations and various other pirating activities. It is also known that by luck or design he arrived on Isla Mujeres in 1854. fell in love with the island and started to build an enormous hacienda which he called Vista Alegre, now re-named Mundaca it had many animals, a plantation and exotic gardens and covered in total 40% of Isla Mujeres an enormous area considering the island is only 4.3 miles long and less than half a mile wide. However, taking into account that the population of the island in 1900 some years later, was just 427 (compared with 22, 668 in the last census). Even after Mundaca had taken up 40% of Isla Mujeres, it was hardly overcrowded. Although the island is nevertheless tiny compared with Cozumel which is 29 miles long and 9 miles wide.

Mundaca was for a time open to the public, there are now plans to reopen it. in which case It is really worth a visit, although there is so much vegetation that mosquitoes are a problem for some people. The hacienda was the love of Mundaca's life, until he actually fell in love with a young and beautiful island girl, but to no avail, as much as he pursued her and showered her with gifts, even dedicated the arches at the entrance to his hacienda to her it was not to be, In spite of Mundaca's wealth and influence she chose to marry a humble local man . Perhaps for the best, as Mundaca by all accounts was not in a particularly stable state of mind, and is said to later have gone insane. He left the island and was never heard of again. His tomb is in Isla Mujeres cemetery, not easy to miss because it's carved with a skull and crossbones, said to be carved Mundaca himself. His remains are not there of course, as nobody knows where he eventually died.