Staying at a Mexican hacienda hotel is like being transported back in time. The casa principal or main house usually stands before an elegant garden ablaze with purple bougainvillaea and red flamboyant. The perfume of orchids fills the air. At some haciendas a massive brick aqueduct arches above and through its arches flows a cerulean blue swimming pool shaded by towering royal palms. Everything is of stone, tile or adobe brick.

The Mexican hacienda was a giant farm. Due to the underdeveloped transportation lines, the haciendas had to be self-sufficient. Along with the grant of land went a grant of Indians. As farm laborers they worked the lands and produced their own food. As carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, potters, weavers, they erected the buildings, kept them in repair, and fabricated all necessary tools and utensils. As servants they kept the owner -- the hacendado -- and his family from ever doing any work. Some hacendados were so wealthy that they could mint their own silver coins with their family's crest.

Residences often had 20 to 30 rooms, on one to three floors, including a salon, music room, billiard room, library, and dining room. Larger houses had two kitchens and two or three patios, with stone fountains, stone or wooden santos (statues of saints), potted plants, flowering vines, shrubbery and fruit and shade trees.

The Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries sent from Spain played a key role in the brutal expropriation of lands from the Indians. Consequently, there wasn't a single hacienda without a chapel, with a bell tower or spire.

The Mexican Revolution brought reforms. The former day-workers took possession of the abandoned manor houses and stripped them for building materials. Before long, these symbols of feudalism fell into decay and ruin.

Many of the great haciendas of Mexico, likened to and often built to resemble the chateaux of France, castles on the Rhine, or magnificent Italian villas have been rescued from decay and transformed into hotels, not the highly polished resort type, easily accessible by air, but luxurious out-of-the-way places that plunge the traveler into romantic old Mexico.

There are 52 Haciendas found in Morelos, like for instance:

- Hacienda de Santa  Catariana in Chiconcuac
- Hacienda in Miacatlan
- Hacienda de San  Jose de Vista Hermosa
- Hacienda de Cortés
- Hacienda in San Gabriel las Palmas
- Hacienda de  Santa Cruz in Vista Alegre
- Hacienda La Mezquitera
- Hacienda de San Juan  Bautista
- Hacienda de San Pedro Martir
- Hacienda de Cocoyoc
- Hacienda de San Carlos Borromeo
- Hacienda de Temixco