Photographs by Bill Begalke

Photo Gallery: San Miguel de Allende: More than a travel destination (Photos by Bill Begalke)

Last year, Conde Nast Traveler listed the colonial city of San Miguel de Allende (SMA) as the 7th best travel destination in the entire world! In my book, it’s NUMBER 1. It’s also more than a travel destination. It’s where I live.

SMA is a small city of about 90,000, located an hour and a quarter from the Leon airport and four hours north of Mexico City by bus. At an elevation of 6,500 feet, it enjoys cool, but not freezing winter weather and moderate, but not hot summer temperatures. After World War II, US veterans discovered San Miguel de Allende and using the GI bill of rights which paid for education of the ex-armed forces personnel, came to study Spanish and art at the Instituto de Allende.

In the 1970s, drawn by the city’s colonial charm and ideal climate, retirees from Canada and the United States began moving to SMA in great numbers. Today, young people still come to San Miguel de Allende to study Spanish and art. Retirees are still attracted to this charming city. It’s estimated that there are at least 2,000 expats living here. Some people claim the great number of north-of-the border residents have turned the city into a gringo compound. But it is clearly a Mexican city. On weekends the local population is joined by Mexicans from all the nearly states to feast in the many restaurants, to shop and to enjoy the ambiance.

The living is easy in San Miguel. Unemployed Mexicans are anxious to be household workers. There are excellent markets, including several that import items which we gringos find it difficult to live without – such as organic foods, Haagen Daaz sorbet and horseradish, to name but a few. There is even a farmer in the area who grows organic vegetables, and a courier who goes to Texas every few weeks to shop in the health food stores and oriental markets for some of us.

It’s also very easy for newcomers to fit into the community. The Mexicans are friendly and welcoming. The foreigners, in turn, work to make the city a better place for themselves and for the indigenous population. The Biblioteca, the second largest bilingual library in Mexico, was founded by expatriates and is operated primarily by a volunteer staff. It has a computer center used in the morning by foreigners and in the afternoon by Mexican children. It also houses a gift shop, restaurant and a new theater for plays, lectures, and a variety of programs.

San Miguel is a cultural wonderland. In August there is a world-class chamber music festival, in the winter a jazz festival, and music and dance performances in between. There are endless art galleries and probably the best craft shops in Mexico with quality crafts from every area of the country.

Acknowledging the substantial income derived from foreign tourists and residents, the federal, state and city governments work together to make the city a desirable place to live. There are enough police on the streets to safely walk home after dark. A million-and-a half dollars are being spent to bury utility cables under the cobble stone streets – electrical, telephone, television and fiber optic. Buildings and shop signs in the historic area of the city must meet federal standards.

Every Tuesday a large outdoor weekly market attracts many vendors from the surrounding countryside. The first week in February growers from all over the area bring foliage and flowering plants to a large park. That’s the time we renew our gardens.

Buses and cars are inspected for emission pollution, but enforcement is not yet effective. City bus rides cost about 25 cents, and taxis are less than $1.25 per ride, so there is really no need to own a vehicle in SMA. Long distance buses go to neighboring cities, with transfer points to all of Mexico. Inexpensive local car services will take you on tours to nearby fascinating destinations. I find it cheaper to hire a car and driver for the day to go on out-of-town trips. It takes much more money to buy a car, maintain it and pay for insurance and gasoline Yet, many residents, accustomed to driving themselves about, are reluctant to shed their wheels. Therefore, traffic around the center of the city is oppressive and will only be mitigated when vehicles are prohibited. There is talk about doing this, but not in the immediate future.

After wintering in the community for three years, I bought a small house in 1997 within easy walking distance of the city center. Once I had purchased and remodeled my home, it didn’t take me long to fit into the community. Information about things to do and the meeting dates of dozens of organizations are listed in two English language newspapers. Atencion San Miguel is published weekly and costs five pesos. Subscription for U.S. and Canada are US$80 per year from:
Bibliotheca Publica de San Miguel de Allende,
Insurgentes 25,
San Miguel de Allende,
GTO 37700, Mexico.

The second publication, El Independiente, features articles on travel, art, culture and current events, and for which I write regularly, is published biweekly and also costs five pesos. An international subscription is $US 45 per year. Its address is:
Calzada de la Presa 53,
San Miguel de Allende,
GTO 37700,
Mexico.

From these two publications you will find listings of groups concerned with, for example, social welfare, ecology, and anthropology. Also announcements of concerts, art exhibits, and other cultural events are described.

We have several movie showings, and many video rental shops; tours to surrounding areas, Spanish classes and an endless number of people who will help keep your body in good condition. We need some of those as the cobblestone streets in the city are treacherous and it is important to watch where you walk.

The Audubon group was my immediate choice for community involvement. Although its main focus is birds, the US Audubon Society, of which the SMA organization is an affiliate, has become involved in environmental and population issues. Increased population in this part of Mexico has destroyed bird habitats. Country folk have decimated the forests by using wood for heat and leaves for animal fodder. The Rio Laja river that flows through half of the state of Guanajuato no longer pauses on its rush to a far distant lake. There is nothing to slow it down since there has been so much silting from the farms and mining of sand and gravel from the river bed. Thus the birds that migrate from Canada through the United States and Mexico to their winter homes in South America have lost their feeding spots and resting places.

In spite of the many organizations and activities that are similar to those in the States, there are many strange and typically Mexican customs that I had to learn and adjust to. For instance, at six in the morning a man passes my house beating a metal bar. He is announcing the arrival of the garbage truck, with a collector who stands on top of the refuse, leans over the side and grabs your bags. In anticipation of this event, I stored my sacks in the garden that nests between my kitchen and bedroom. The first night, I slept fitfully waiting for this event, climbed out of bed, rushed to the garden, picked up the bags, and heard the door slam and lock behind me. I was trapped in my garden! I picked up a rock, crashed it through the glass, opened the door and rushed to the street. The truck had passed. The next day after reviewing several alternatives, I hired two men: a handyman to do odd jobs around the house and deliver the garbage t o a truck that arrives at another street at a later hour, and a glass worker to replace the broken pane. Since then, the truck arrives at 7 am and I’m prepared for it. However, I am now composting my food scraps to nourish my plants, so I don’t have to meet the truck every time I hear the clanging metal bar.

With its endless holy days, holidays, festivals and happenings, San Miguel de Allende is a popular vacation destination for Mexicans and foreigners. There are fiestas and celebrations at Easter, Christmas, Saint Patrick Day and Independence Day. There are numerous days honoring mothers, the dead, saints, builders and masons, taxi drivers, the constitution and patriots, And let’s not forget the running of the bulls when hundreds of youth from all over Mexico descend on the square to see if they can outrun these raging animals. On this day, in late September, I stay in my house and let the doctors, Red Cross workers and Emergency Medical Technicians deal with the eight score wounded. Many of these occasions are accompanied by exploding fire crackers and night time fireworks that echo through the city. Since September has so many festivals I now plan to travel during that month to the US or other hemispheres.

My sleep is sometimes interrupted by loud explosions. Mourners explode firecrackers to inform the angels that their dearly departed are on their way to heaven and should be welcomed. Fireworks frequently announce the union of a bride and groom in a nearby church or to entertain families and friends at a neighborhood birthday party. Mariachi bands that congregate in and around the Jardin offer their services. If they are not hired on the spot they roam from restaurant to restaurant hoping that diners will not only applaud them, but will give them tips.

Restaurants serve meals that are varied, delicious and inexpensive often in delightful surroundings , and often to the accompaniment of excellent guitarists. I have so many favorite dining places, it is difficult to list them all. The Bouganvilla is around the corner from me. Ole-Ole serves great fajitas. El Tomato is a good vegetarian restaurant. Casa Blanca has good food , including my favorite, chocolate mousse, and a gorgeous view of the city. It’s hardly fair to name only these as there are so many that are equally good and where you can get a fine meal from US$ 4 to $10. I’m anxiously awaiting the opening of a new Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood.

There are many places to stay, from upscale hotels like the Puertacita Boutique Hotel, the Villa Jacaranda, the Posada de San Francisco (at the center square), the modestly priced Quinta Loreto, and many bed and breakfasts. To get detailed information you can order the very reliable The Insider’s Guide to San Miguel from Archie Dean at 1900 Fox Drive, Suite 84, Box 178. McAllen Tx 78504-4119 for $14. It lists hotels, bed and breakfasts, apartments and most everything else you might want to know, including the bull fights (which I won’t discuss).

Medical care is often a concern of people with an eye to moving to Mexico. There are many well trained physicians and hospitals nearby, one of which in nearby Queretero, Hospital San Jose, will transfer you to Houston if you need sophisticated care.

If you are 62 years old there are inexpensive air fares valid for travel between the U.S, Mexico, Canada, Hawaii, Alaska and the Caribbean. These come in books of four trips a year and are offered by Continental and United Airlines, as well as others.

In the next installment, I will explore other aspects of this wonderful city.

With Photographs by Bill Begalke

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Photo Gallery: San Miguel: the town that parties too much

The Valle de Maiz drops away from the old highway to Queretaro into a narrow, gloomy gulch, the dirt streets bounded by broken walls, unfinished homes, dark shadowed places and an occasional vacant lot cluttered with refuse wind blown down the canyon from the nearby Mexican mesa.

It is where the witches and sorcerers live.

They don’t call themselves that, of course, to your face. They are not brujas or brujos — they are facilitators. In fact, the ones living in San Miguel de Allende keep office hours, have cellular telephones and appointment books. And, contrary to folklore, their services are not cheap.

But then neither is the cost of living in SMA, as the local English language press is fond of calling San Miguel de Allende. Although expenses aren’t as steep as Calle Cuesta de San Jose, rising 500 vertical feet from the valley floor up Moctezuma hill, the truth is that this town has become pricey.

That very hillside twinkles at night with the halogen lamps of the wealthy Mexicans and well-to-do North Americans who call this place home—at least for part of the year.

When it is not their time to be in residence, their homes are available to rent for weeks or months at a time, complete with maid and usually a gardener. For the traveler in no hurry, a stay in such a home in such a town is the ultimate sojourn.

And San Miguel is the ultimate monument to both historical preservation and cultural wannabeeism that exists in Mexico. This is not to say that a lot of the artists and writers and musicians and dancers who live and work in SMA are not as authentic as the stuccoed walls that line its quaint, ankle-busting cobblestone streets.

But as surely as the controversy surrounding the replacement of those cobblestones with flat stones enraged the citizenry and pleased the taxi drivers, most of the residential restoration and new construction in colonial style architecture is occupied by Gringos, here because it’s the place to be. After all, San Miguel de Allende has earned a ranking within the “Top Ten Places to Live in the World” lists for over twelve years.

The opening night cocktail circuit of art galleries is a tradition among a large segment of the expatriate community. But the real artists, unless it is their work on display that night, rarely show up. They are quietly ensconced behind the massive stone or brick walls that isolate their private life from the public spectacle of town.

If spectacle is what sells, however, then a recent return to San Miguel by the late artist John Fulton serves to illustrate the unusual blending of life and art in this town. John was a student at the Instituto Allende in 1953, and it was then that he began a parallel career as a matador. His art also mimicked his sport, for much of his most famous work is a series of bullfight poster art.

As his fame as an artist grew, so did his reputation as a bullfighter. In a fitting end to that part of his life, and with a symmetry Hemingway would have admired, he returned to San Miguel to stage an exposition of his work at the Instituto and appear at the Plaza de Toros in the Corrida of his “Despedida,” his retirement fight.

Most of the artistic talent that resides in San Miguel, however, is much less demonstrative. Make no mistake, some of the art produced here is very good, and the atmosphere that the town and its two prestigious schools of artistic endeavor—the Bellas Artes and Instituto Allende—lend to enhance that inspiration can seize even the most inept amateur with fits of creative passion.

San Miguel is like Santa Fe, New Mexico, in that respect, as well as being its near twin historical city at the other end of the altiplano, the great North American desert. Both are at opposite ends of the Camino Real.

Founded almost five hundred years ago, SMA was home to some of Mexico’s most revered heroes, especially Ignacio Allende, one of the martyred leaders of the failed drive for independence from Spanish rule in 1810. A statue in his honor overlooks the corner of the main town square, locally called The Jardin: the garden.

A respected Mexican businessman, reflecting upon a photograph of that statue, remarked once that the pose struck in marble tended to make Allende look a little “feminine.” But, in another part of town, in the civic plaza, the hero Allende sits astride a galloping steed. The horse’s nostrils are flared, the teeth grip the bit, its hoofs are held high, and Allende, the military man, brandishes a saber in the air.

The allusion is well put, however, since San Miguel has a sizeable gay population, perhaps due to the large number of creative people drawn to its beauty and history. They seem to be involved in every civic and artistic event, and one straight resident commented that if, for some reason, the universal tolerance would disappear and force the gay community to depart, the rest of the Gringos would probably follow them out of town.

But, if no change in the social structure is desired, neither can San Miguel change architecturally from the historical colonial character that distinguishes it. El Centro, the city center, is a living, working National monument. Recent efforts to enhance that designation have included the burying of overhead power and telephone lines and the removal of all hanging business signage. In fact, all store signs must be in Spanish and painted discreetly upon the wall near the entrance to the business.

San Miguel loves to party, too. Fiestas! There are so many fiestas that at one moment in time, the Archbishop told the people to cut some out in favor of devoting more energy to working. Apparently, his dictum did not take.

And how they party.

The sounds of what locals euphemistically call fireworks rattle the windows at night, usually proclaiming the movement of some religious icon from one church to another. This town is full of religious shrines.

One particular icon is moved from a distant church to one in El Centro in the dead of night. The fireworks serve to inform the believers and wake visitors. The explosions burst like aerial bombs, their concussions awaken and frighten the dog population that either breaks into fits of howling or runs for cover. The pealing bells proclaim their painful pronouncement of yet another fiesta and the night air becomes a cantata of dogs and a cacophony of bells.

These are the times when the locals can dress up in drag, call themselves “Los Locos,” the crazies, and dance to their heart’s content. But the masks they wear must never reveal the face behind it, just as everyday life demands that the true soul be submerged to society’s standard. The crazies have just found a happier way of dealing with conformity.

It is not uncommon to be sitting quietly in the Jardin one moment enjoying the crisp morning air, and in the next minute to be surrounded by hundreds of Indian dancers, their plumed costumes radiant in the brilliant sun.

The shifts of festival dancers continue throughout the day, while the square would be filled with whirling, chanting warriors, other dancers would lounge along the edges sipping on bottled water, awaiting their turn.

The constant pounding of the drums would be overtaken only by the massive bells of La Parroquia, the parish church and the town’s signature building. It is the very focal point of the town, probably more photographed and painted than all of the other more important churches in San Miguel.

Great flocks of pigeons call its ornately carved spires home, darting back and forth between the Jardin and the church steeples, causing the poor hapless pedestrians to duck for of fear of being hit. The town is well known for its other feathered inhabitants, as well. Until recently, sinister looking boat tailed grackles would swoop down upon the Laurel trees in the Jardin at sunset, the din of their shrieks approaching the threshold of pain. Within half an hour they had settled in for the night and the quiet returned, but woe unto the humans who passed below. The birds’ nocturnal residency in the Jardin was ended when nets were draped around the trees, forcing the night visitors out of El Centro.

Every evening beautiful flights of white egrets and herons that nest in the tall trees of Benito Juarez park, their feathers glowing like ivory in the orange tinge of sunset, wing in formation at night fall back from the fields and lakes of the countryside.

Each day the smell of corn baking wafts from the narrow storefronts located on every street. The Tortillerias utilize a contraption in appearance not unlike farm machinery of half-a-century ago, giant Rube Goldberg devices that groan and creak as they automate handmade tortillas out of existence. A huge tin funnel consumes an enormous lump of corn flour, masa, and spits it out at the bottom onto a continuous belt as a finished tortilla. The endless procession of flat, cooked tortillas, looking like a series of silicon mother-boards with chips destined for computers, move down the conveyor belt into a basket and are eagerly snatched up by waiting customers.

House maid and Indian alike, one buying as a side dish for the employer, the other for sustenance for a family, form a line in front of each store. The native culture was founded on corn, and that simple vegetable still has a profound influence upon the daily life of Mexicans.

But now progress is invading tradition, and shelves of Bimbo white bread at the super mercado have been substituted for the Indian staff of life for the emerging Mexican middle class. White flour, much of it imported from El Norte, is finding its way into the diet and the culture.

Such a simple thing will change forever how these people live, ironically just as variations on their popular dishes have become the number one ethnic food North of the border.

The distinctive sound of the pick-up’s horn announcing delivery of fresh milk from the farm; the melody of the small flute blown by the knife sharpener as he pushes his cart street to street; the clanging of the iron bar to warn the maids the trash man is nearby; the heaps of animal fodder small boys lug home to feed the family goats and burros—someday, perhaps, all these unique sights and sounds will disappear from San Miguel.

But if they do, will that mean an end to the inspiration that has empowered painters and artisans alike to create their treasures? Surely, the magnificent light that bathes the town will not change. The physical beauty of its buildings are a constant, too.

But the times are always changing, and no place, not even a national monument, is immune to that. When the witches start using a Day-Timer to schedule appointments to rid you of your personal demons, then it is clear that change is inescapable.

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Photo Gallery: Mexico City's miracle mile (or two)

“Wait,” she protested. She bent over the crouched photographer busily framing the pleasant scene for posterity, his camera at the ready, shutter cocked. She spoke loudly into his ear. “Wait!”

On the very street – no, more like a boulevard in a city of grand boulevards – where being seen is becoming the number one meaning and purpose of life, the protestations of the Doña Dueña, clearly the manager of a bistro known as SNOB, hardly made sense.

“Wait. Who gives you the right to photograph here?” Her voice echoed across the mock colonial courtyard that contained tables full of beautiful people noisily enjoying a late afternoon meal.

In this outdoor public square just off the Avenida Presidente Masaryk that is shared by boutiques, art galleries and trendy little cafes, the canopy of SNOB unmistakably dominates the view. And if the people gathered under its canvas banner want nothing more, it is to be seen. Obviously the photographer was capturing an editorial moment.

“Literary license,” was the answer to the question that drove the accuser back into the small, dark doorway under the inflated signage. The photographer snapped the picture, and left the courtyard, walking to the curb and crammed himself into the back of a VW beetle cab. It sputtered and roared away down the avenida, continuing a visual note-taking tour of Mexico City’s newest and brightest commercial star in an otherwise battered metropolis struggling to retain its livability.

Both sides of Avenida Presidente Masaryk are lined with high-end European designer showrooms, boutiques, and shops catering to the international community. Photography by Bill Begalke © 2001

This is Polanco, the Rodeo Drive of the Federal District, and it is quickly replacing the famous Zona Rosa as the city’s center of affluent commerce. It is where the Hard Rock Café located itself in a renovated mansion just off Chapultepec Park, a green space that is an oasis of tranquility in the midst of what is arguably the largest city in the world.

The cab driver, negotiating a difficult U-turn through a phalanx of pedestrians stoically comments to the photographer passenger, “There are too many people. There are too many of us.”

Mexico City is certainly one of the most crowded, noisy, polluted cities on the planet. Incongruous as it sounds, it took until the year 1900 for the city to once again reach the same population as existed in the original Aztec capital when Cortez entered it in the sixteenth century. Now the population increases by 3,000 souls each day.

One million tourists come here too, including the taxi’s passenger now embarked upon a photographic safari of the Polanco district, then driving through Chapultepec Park to emerge on the broad Paseo de la Reforma which forms one boundary of the Zona Rosa.

Chapultepec Park serves as a kind of “Everyman’s land” between Polanco, an exclusive enclave of prosperity, and the Zona Rosa, mecca for foreign tourists, artists and the wealthy for almost forty years.

It is in the park that you will see the average Mexican and view his or her history displayed throughout the many museums located there; it is in Polanco and the Zona Rosa that you will see a show.

On Avenida Presidente Masaryk, the major arterial road in Polanco, can be found the most famous names in the world of fashion and design. Housed in buildings of gleaming marble, onyx, or gray stone edifices, protected by the best-dressed security guards in the city, all the wishes of a shopper’s lifetime can be found along the boulevard.

In the surrounding neighborhood of palatial homes hidden behind high walls, shaded by ancient trees that arch cathedral-like over the side streets, huge high-rise hotels share space with the crème-de-la-crème designer names of Cartier and Armani. The Nikko and Presidente hotels soar upward through the trees bordering Chapultepec, the Camino Real hides around a quiet corner.

A stop at one of the diverse eating establishments in the district finds the photographer sampling fresh fish sashimi at a gleaming post modern sushi house on the avenida. The interior is a simple stark pastel against black fixtures separated by glass brick. The presence of one of Mexico’s leading stars, a woman simply know as Talia, distracts the decidedly sophisticated crowd both inside and seated at the sidewalk tables under exhaust-soiled canvas awnings.

Timidly, one by one, her fans approach her table, seeking the obligatory autograph. Fearfully, they interrupt what appears to be a reunion with sisters and brothers and Mother and Father and Grandmother and extended family.

Talia shakes her shoulder length hair side to side, her neck arched backward, her long lashed eyes gazing upward at the designer halogen spotlights criss-crossing the ceiling. She giggles, inquires of each fan the name of the recipient of her largess, and dashes off a quick swiggle on the proffered piece of paper.

Outside, literally hiding-in-the-bushes, stand her bodyguards, their eyes hooded by dark-rimmed sunglasses, their left hands clutching a cellular phone, their right posed to reach underneath their tailored suits.

Life in the big city among the famous is apparently the same regardless of the big city in question. But the propinquity of so many security people must make Polanco one of Mexico City’s safest neighborhoods.

And Capitalinos have a passion for the cellular phone, and what used to be merely unnerving driving habits now has a whole new meaning with the locals talking and steering their cars through the mad rush of traffic at the same time. Even the VW taxi, once again taking the photographer on his tour, offers the use of a cellular phone for one dollar a minute, three-minute minimum.

The proximity of Polanco to Chapultepec Park insures a steady flow of visitors. The sights to be seen in the park will stagger the imagination. No less than eight major repositories of art and history are located there.

The park has been linked to the original settlement by Aztec culture in 1266 when the few hundred newly arrived tribe members held their first “New Fire” ceremony there to signal the beginning of another 52 year calendar cycle.

Today Chapultepec, an ancient word meaning the hill of the grasshoppers, contains some of the finest museums and art galleries in the hemisphere. It is also the location of the presidential residence, Los Piños, and the former presidential palace, itself site of Emperor Maxmillian’s court, and before that, a military academy that figured prominently in the Mexican-American war, and originally was one of Cortez’s residences.

Below the palace, at the base of the hill, a quick turn and the VW taxi enters the Paseo de la Reforma that extends eastward. Emperor Maxmillian ordered it constructed, modeling it after the Champs Elysées. He died by firing squad a few years later, never witnessing its formal dedication by the very man who sentenced him to death.

Originally, magnificent townhouses and villas constructed of gray-stone reaching four stories high with pitched roofs and ornamental iron work built in the French style reminiscent of Paris lined either side of the boulevard. Many still survive in the Zona Rosa.

As the Paseo intersected with other major avenues, the city architects created glorietas, gigantic traffic circles that entomb monumental sculptures at their center. These roundabouts broke the monotony of the beautifully broad, green-fringed boulevard. The huge trees which grew to shade both travelers and park sitting natives alike have suffered from the sad legacy pollution has brought to the city.

Today, lining the curbs are modern glass towers, art deco classics and colonial palaces interspersed with garish commercial businesses, first class hotels, and the omnipresent Sanborn drug store. The area between the Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Chapultepec is technically the Zona Rosa, the pink zone.

The glorieta that houses the monument to Mexican Independence, better known as El Angel, informally marks the beginning of the Zona Rosa. There is subtle irony in that nickname, for the statue, though referred to in the masculine tense, is clearly a feminine figure. Machismo dies hard in the captial.

Similarly, the Zona Rosa purports to be fashion and trendiness, but behind the shop-fronts are some of oldest, most elaborate buildings still existing in the city. A contemporary façade can conceal a century of history.

The name of the first resident to convert the street level parlor of his townhouse into a retail store, a tienda, is lost to time. Since the early 1950’s, most of the first floor levels became the art galleries, boutiques and bistros that made the Zona Rosa infamous.

But even a VW is a large car for the narrow streets of the zone, prompting the photographer to abandon the trusty taxi to enter the district on foot.

The streets were named for European cities during a period of infatuation with things European. Rutted and rolling though the pavement is, the sidewalks are an obstacle course because of damage done by years of earthquakes and demolition.

Scattered in each block are vacant spaces awaiting re-building; a modern mall consumes a quarter of one sizable city block. One section of the zone has been turned into a pedestrian mall, complete with large artistic nude statuary, quite unlike the historical cast-iron clutter found along the Paseo de la Reforma.

There on the Paseo connecting these two commercial centers of the city, statues to heroes of the revolution(s), metal visionaries from the past, all point lifeless arms to the future, a future that Mexico City is having difficulty dealing with.

The clutter to be found in the Zona Rosa will most likely be a homeless person, huddled in the darkened doorway of a still-existing home, hand outstretched for a few meager pesos thrown by sympathetic capitalinos.

Young boys rush vehicles caught at intersections, dousing windshields with the spray from plastic bottles, then toweling them off for a peso tip. Incredibly, others stand on street corners, spitting gasoline into the air, igniting it in an instant to become fire-eaters for a few coins.

People charge by, driven by the mad pace of this city, by the magic and excitement that lives side-by-side with the crowding and poverty.

It is as if, within this city, deafened by the clamor of jack-hammers and stone chippers, the people still embrace life as it is for all the very same reasons that others would strive to avoid.

“Wait,” in Mexico City applies only after reaching the goal, never to the middle of the journey.

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Photo Gallery: The five faces of God: Mexico's Sierra Gorda missions

It must have been an incredibly difficult and painful journey in its time, sailing from Sevilla on the very frontier of Europe to Nueva España, then traveling on foot within the limitless boundaries of that still empty land from one end of the new empire to the other.

The 17th and 18th centuries in the New World were populated with a rugged breed of explorers, some in search of treasure and others in service to God. They were scoundrels and saints who willingly undertook that perilous passage and, in some cases, became a part of history, a still living history remaining to this day as it existed in their own time.

That fact applies as equally to the scoundrels as to the saints, but in the pursuit of the truth sometimes that very truth becomes obscured through time and revisionists—unless monuments remain to this day testifying to their human greatness or infamy.

Of those early explorers who qualify as saints, the glorious monuments left behind celebrating Spanish Franciscan Fray Junipero Serra are not of him.

They are by him.

And they are found in Mexico.

They are known as the missions of the Sierra Gorda.

There are others he constructed, to be sure; the California missions are famous around the world. But the most splendid of all of Serra’s missions, the ones in Mexico, are themselves a paradox.

These particularly marvelous monuments rest among the mountains in Queretaro state, all within a few minutes drive of each other. They are the crowning jewels of the pueblos of Jalpan, Concá, Tilaco, Landa, and Tancoyol.

And in one of them today, a living saint, described so by his own parishioners El Santo, a Franciscan friar from Catalonia, truly named Fray Francisco Miracles, attends to his small flock alone, as he has for over thirty-three years.

His church at Tilaco lies in a beautiful valley some ten kilometers from the state highway. The valley floor is covered with small fincas, the tilled soil of the farmlands a deep brown contrasted against the pale dried yellow of fallow pasture.

The surrounding rolling mountains are forested with a semi-tropical growth mixed with pines and cedars. A thin veil of smoke from land clearing casts a luminous haze upon the valley, softening the sunlight just as a high wispy cloud masks the sun’s brightness.

From the mirador, the lookout atop the pass into the valley, Tilaco immediately recalls the mythical Shangri-La.

Of these five missions, only Tilaco was not constructed directly by Serra, but he did supervise its overall building; saying upon seeing the finished church, “En este lugar la tierra y el cielo cantan al creador: In this place the earth and the sky sing to the creator.”

Although all the monuments by Serra are missions—sanctuaries and churches to the glory of God—it is clear that the twenty-one more famous and visited California missions, even considering the beauty of their simplicity, pale in comparison to the five missions of the Sierra Gorda.

There is nothing like the Sierra Gorda missions in the New World or the old. And within the entire New World, the spiritual contrast existing between the conquerors and their religion and the old myths and gods of the natives has never been more apparent than in the facades of these missions.

They have been described by experts as a totally original piece of work, unmatched through out the world.

And, most remarkable of all, they are still fully functional missions and have always been from their beginning, still served by the Franciscan Friars, Serra’s order. The missions have not fallen to ruin and been resurrected by a tourism department or chamber of commerce to be an attraction or museum as is the case with the California ones.

But the missions of the Sierra Gorda have been restored physically to their former glory—at least their facades have.

These are, however, working missions in the very sense of the word.

They deal with life on a daily basis today as they always have: The births, the burials, the weddings and the celebrations mutually shared by the congregation correspond closely to those performed from the time of the Spanish rule.

There is no question that the family names on the birth and death registers of these missions maintained by the good fathers have been the same, generation after generation, right down to this day almost two hundred and fifty years after the construction of these monuments.

The most obvious physical distinction between these Mexican missions and the ones that rose later in time along the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco is the use of a stone facade rather than plain stucco or plaster.

For the most part, the labor available to construct the missions of California was unskilled at the task of building the equivalent of the great stone edifices of ancient Mexico, so the good friars in California had to make do with what materials and abilities existed.

The mission in Carmel has a wonderful campanario, bell tower, but when Serra finished construction of it, the bells that rang in celebration were in Mexico City.

The stone faces of the Sierra Gorda missions were intricately carved by native craftsmen who had been carving stone facades for thousands of years before La Conquista. They would have the last laugh on their overseers and subjugators.

There, etched into the stone of the mission’s faces for all time, is a collection of pagan gods and symbols, political insults, creatures of the jungle and the sea, plus assorted saints, martyrs, and angels.

They are a confluent mingling of Christianity and paganism resulting in a bizarre syncretic interpretation of scriptural history. In layman’s terms, they are an astounding example of symbols reflecting spiritual order out of chaos

A chaos at least as interpreted in the minds of the Franciscans led by Junipero Serra, and the Indians they sought to convert.

Accommodations by the friars to smooth the differences, and more remarkably the similarities, of the two beliefs find their final expression in stone from bell tower top to building foundation.

The joining of two disparate worlds was never more eloquent or poignant.

The imagery in the stone seeks to glorify the saints and mythology of the Church, and yet hidden but quite visible within the carvings are symbols dealing with the ancient Indian faith.

At the top of the facade in Landa, under the feet of Saint Michael the Archangel, en Espanol Santiago Matamoros, the killer of Moors, there are representations of beheaded Moors, their tongues hanging from open mouths, so long that they drape over the parapet, a purely Indian way of showing death.

These missions are true Spanish missions, not Mexican, in the representation of saints and state-church political ties. But they are also intensely Indian in the duality of the symbolism, keeping in mind that their gods had the ability to change shape and role at will.

This may account for the ease with which Serra and the friars were able to mount the conversion of the hither-to undefeated Pames Indians. Where the Spanish army had failed, the army of the Church succeeded.

But did the Indians truly embrace the new God, or instead accept the idea that their gods had simply changed form again?

The most prominent figure on most facades is the representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the black Madonna, the patron saint of Mexico and the Indians. Yet, she is truly a construction of both the Church and the people to find some connection, however tenuous, in both cultures to unite them into one.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the people of the Sierra Gorda still come to the missions believing what they know in their hearts. It is a belief shared with their ancestors, who also believed in the power of the heart, so much so that ancient ritual sacrifice required the removal of the still-beating heart from the chest of the human offering.

The native religion was and is one based upon the principle of sacrifice for the appeasement of the divine power, now reduced to the less violent symbols of bread and wine, but never-the-less rooted in a common theme.

With the completion of the missions in the Sierra Gorda, a task that took Junipero Serra nine years and after another nine year period as administrator of the Apostolic College of San Fernando, he moved on to Baja California to keep up the missions originally founded by the then exiled Jesuits.

These times of exploration and the division of Western North America by the world powers of Spain, England, and Russia, ultimately led Serra to become identified as the Apostle of California.

Almost a century earlier Sir Francis Drake was the first European to discover San Francisco Bay, and he claimed the region of Northern California for England as Nova Albion in 1579.

The Spanish, fearful of both the English and a more obvious threat by Russian explorers moving South along the coast, sent the governor of Baja California, Captain Gaspar de Portola up the wild Pacific coast to establish garrisons – presidios, founded at San Diego and Monterey.

With him and the expedition of Jose de Galver in 1769 was Fray Junipero Serra, and he founded the first of the missions that would line the El Camino Real at San Diego de Alcala. In the passage of his remaining years, he founded and constructed more missions in California, being personally responsible for nine of the missions before his death.

The missions were intended to subjugate the native Indians and help supply the new forts, deemed to be too far from Mexico, with the necessary supplies for survival. Herein, however, lies the tragedy of Serra’s involvement with the California missions.

Although he has been described as dedicated to energetic discipline and zeal through constant visitations to the missions, and is credited with defending the Indians against abusive and interfering colonists, the new workers were in fact virtual slaves suffering from a high death rate due to inhuman working conditions and diseases brought by the Spanish.

At the beginning of Serra’s California projects, there were 70,000 Indian workers. By the time it had been completed, only 15,000 remained

He has also been called “enthusiastic, battling, almost quarrelsome, fearless, keen-wined, fervently devout, unselfish, and a single-minded missionary.” He died in 1784 at 71 years of age, after 34 years of missionary labor.

Over a period of 54 years beginning with San Diego twenty one missions were constructed, each one a day journey from the next.

The missions of California do share two important foot notes in Serra’s life.

Among the plants brought by Serra and his Franciscan missionaries to Alta California to help established agriculture at the new Mission San Diego were olives. Today California supplies the United States with 99% of its olive production.

The second historical oddity regards Serra’s birthplace, the tiny village of Petra on the island of Majorca, where he first served as a Friar.

Today there is a small locked chapel in the Cathedral in which Serra was both baptized, and performed baptisms later when he served the church.

Behind its doors repose statues, representations of an unlikely collection of saints that has existed since Serra’s time. They are arranged left to right, front to back to front around the room.

The names of the statues mimic the names given by Serra to the California missions South to North, beginning with the mission of San Juan Capistrano in the South, and ending in San Francisco in the North.

The legacy Serra left behind to California was the memory of his beloved home in Majorca.

The legacy left behind in Mexico remains in the form of pathos etched in stone depicting the enormous social upheaval that occurred during the death of an entire civilization and the creation of a new one.

Serra’s work survives from one end of what was Nueva España to the other, over a distance he traveled barefoot, an almost impossible task.

A task that Father Miracles of Tilaco repeated fifteen years ago.

At the age of 60, Fray Francisco Miracles walked from his mission deep in the Sierra Gorda to Alta California to witness first hand all of Serra’s other missions.

Then he walked back home again.

That was a pilgrimage of about 4,000 miles

He does not move about as easily today, his walking stick, the one that measured his step during his pilgrimage, is now a necessity. But he continues to serve the people of his parish, still trying to pursue the vision of Serra.

That vision, at times criticized because of the cultural consequences to the Native people, today remains etched in those stone facades, hidden in the valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains of Mexico.

They are called the Five Missions of the Sierra Gorda.

They are Five Faces of God.

IF YOU GO

Junipero Serra’s Missions of the Sierra Gorda are located a four-hour-mind-inspiring-boggling ride from San Miguel De Allende, That city is recommended as a base for travel throughout the interior region of colonial Mexico, not only for its superior accommodations and tourism infrastructure, but because two of Mexico’s finest schools of continuing education are located there: The Instituto Allende, and the government-sponsored Belles Artes.

Travellers can easily arrange persona! accommodations in the Sierra Gorda and travel to the Missions if they wish to visit independently, but may lack the historical information due to a total lack of printed material in English on the Missions. There is bus service from Queretaro to Jalpan, the center of the Mission region.

TO GET THERE:

If you choose San Miguel as your base, it is located in the high desert, the Altiplano at over six thousand feet altitude 75 miles Northwest of Mexico City, a world and centuries away from the megalopolis that is Mexico’s capital. If you enter the country through Mexico City’s International airport, find the Metro terminal at the airport, buy a ticket on the Cinco or Yellow Line of the train, and ride to the stop at Terminal Norte bus station. There, purchase a ticket from one of the First Class bus companies that offer excellent, swift service to San Miguel. It will take about four hours by bus.If you wish to by-pass Mexico City completely, take a flight to the airport in Leon that serves the state of Guanajuato. You can either arrange in advance for a pick-up by one of the many travel services in San Miguel (an example is Viajes San Miguel on the web at www.enjoy-mexico.com), or you can take a taxi from Leon to San Miguel. Either way, the trip will cost you approximately $40 dollars per person although that can vary with travel services depending on the number of riders.

HOTELS:

For a town as small as San Miguel (approximately 50,000) it has an enormous selection of styles and sizes of accommodations to pick from, all the way from huge, hacienda style resort hotels on the edge of town, to small Posadas or inns that rent clean, quiet rooms for $10.00 a night.

Among those hotels in San Miguel that have found favor are Casa de Sierra Nevada, a high-end elegant hotel in the city; La Puertecita Boutique Hotel, located on Moctezuma Hill above town; Casa Schuck, a luxurious bed and breakfast located at Bajada de La Garita #3; Villa Santa Monica, at the edge of Parque Juarez, a beautiful pink colonial treasure; Villa Jacaranda, on the other side of the park, beautiful dining, and movies on a large screen TV four nights a week; Posada Carmina, a charming hotel recently renovated just steps from the Jardin, the center square.

If you choose to go independently to the Missions, the Queretaro state run Hoteles Mesones are located within a short distance of all the missions, and there are five total, the one at Concá a delightful ex-sugar hacienda.

RESTAURANTS:

In San Miguel the selection is as broad as the cuisine and prices offered. The favorites of the expatriate community are: Bugambilia; El Pegaso; El Campanario; El Meson de San Jose; Mama Mia; Tio Lucas; La Grotta; Rincon Espanol; Ten Ten Pie; and Ole-Ole’.

The independent traveler will find that each of the Hoteles Mesones near the Missions offer hall dining service.

The post The five faces of God: Mexico’s Sierra Gorda missions appeared first on MexConnect.

Photo Gallery: Guanajuato: Journey to the center of the universe

The most important visual image in the classic film, ” Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” was not the alien spaceship, but the imposing stone monolith chosen as the site of the encounter. In an attempt to understand the significance of his mental image of that place the star of the film almost goes mad.

It should come as no surprise to the traveller that the fictionalized location exists in fact as Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming.

What is astonishing is that a similar geological feature rises over one thousand feet above the high desert of Mexico, and has been considered for eons in native folklore and myth as “The Navel of the Universe.” It is more than merely similar, it is magnetic.

Today, at the base of this Mexican monolith lies the town of Bernal, muy tranquilo in the sun. It is a nascent folk art and craft center, and is slowly becoming a new retreat for artists escaping the tensions and crowding of a modern, digitizing world.

Bernal is the center of a region that contains other gems of Mexican beauty and history: the cities of San Miguel De Allende, Pozos, Querétaro, Guanajuato, and Tequisquiapan. It is a region not frequented by tourists, or spaceships for that matter.

But it should be.

The historical importance of these cities in shaping Mexico today is almost eclipsed by the beauty of their colonial architecture. For these two reasons alone, although there are many others, the visitor should seek out this Mexico not found on the package tour.

But it shouldn’t be.

Central Mexico should be examined in a more leisurely, Mexican way, taking time to walk the streets, but traveling the highways in a bus. Buses are the preferred means of transportation in this nation.

The varied classes of bus service, from the gleaming Mercedes Benz monsters complete with TV and snacks and a usually operating baño to the former Bluebird school buses still struggling out a living for the owner, all crisscross this heartland of Mexico, allowing the visitor the opportunity to pick and choose an independent schedule with more time devoted to a slow walk through history.

Begin this marvelous journey in the birthplace of one of Mexico’s greatest heroes; stop at a city abandoned to time and the wind, once one of the richest cities of the New World. On to the one that is perhaps the most Mexican of cities, where a foreign-born emperor was executed and a president gave away half his nation to settle a war, all to the roll of drums; then arrive at the city where the great hero was martyred in the nation’s quest for independence from Spain.

Spend a little time next at a weekend retreat that fulfills the requirements of a Palm Springs escape, but without the overhead. Return to the Navel—Bernal—to center yourself with the universe before checking out for home.

You can reach the starting point of San Miguel from the capital, Mexico City, Districto Federál. A more convenient and less hectic arrival can be made through the airport in León, the state of Guanajuato. Fast luggage retrieval, efficient immigration and customs, and out you go through the exit to board a first class bus bound for San Miguel.

Don Ignacio De Allende, one of the four founders of the revolution that ultimately took all their lives and eleven years of war to conclude victoriously, was born in San Miguel, now named San Miguel De Allende to ensure that everyone knows it is this particular San Miguel out of the countless ones that dot the land, and certainly no other.

It is also an artists’ colony, has been one for years, and, over recent time, has become a center of learning with the establishment of the Instituto Allende and the Bellas Artes, both schools of the arts, along with language academies. Now the University of the Valley of Mexico has opened a campus for students pursuing careers in business.

That makes this a town of professionals, but the visitor is happily surprised to witness a harmonious mix of people living side-by-side, not to mention the roosters, dogs and occasional pig on the next rooftop.

It also happens to be a very beautiful place.

It sits in the middle of a desert of mesquite and cactus, a multi-hued painting of itself on a canvas of beige and brown and gray, with a annual verdant background change every rainy season.

A very hostile and opposite world will be seen in Pozos, a short distance by bus. Everything about Pozos is a sunburn shade of yellow: the ruins, the soil, the rocks and brush. It is a ghost town as riddled with mine shafts as a rotten tree is with termites. One false step and the next stop is 800 feet down. Its soil and the water that now fills the shafts are polluted with the minerals used to extract the silver ore.

It is quite otherworldly. And vacant. And one man has the key to it all.

Not by coincidence he also runs the only hotel in the still inhabited surviving village, which boasts very little else except for a small museum, craft shops featuring native musical instruments, and a soaring smooth-stone walkway, three hundred feet from bottom to top, up to the doors of a church. Its use is intended for the knees of the penitent.

“And what,” you ask, “is the significance of Pozos in this bus ride through history?”

It’s mines were simply one of the main sources of Spain’s wealth, then Mexico’s.

If Pozos was a “City of Silver,” then pretender to the appellation “City of gold,” would have to be Querétaro. Today it is a prospering, industrializing city of historical proportions. Through it runs one of the largest remaining examples of a colonial aqueduct system, its graceful arches a national monument, soaring hundreds of feet in the blue sky.

Piercing that same sky is an enormous statue of Benito Juarez, considered by many the father of the newest Mexico. The stone eyes, filled with apparent but inferred anger, gaze down upon the city in which the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Santa Ana.

That document ceded half of the nation’s land mass and most of its wealth to the neighbor to the North. Here, too, a foreign-born duke turned emperor, in an elegant square lined with the trees he had ordered planted, placed gold coins in the palms of his firing squad so that their bullets would not disfigure his face.

His reign ended. His tactic failed.

Yet his fate is still a far cry from that of Allende, the patriot. He was beheaded and later, in Guanajuato, the capital of the state where San Miguel is located, his severed head was placed in a cage, and suspended from one of the four corners of The Granary, La Alhóndiga. From the other three corners hung the heads of his co-conspirators, Hidalgo, Aldama, and Jimenez.

Ironically, however, the largest statue overlooking this city most enamored with things Spanish is of “El Pípila”, the Indian who history records as being responsible for destroying the huge wooden doors to The Granary during the 1810 revolution, thus permitting the slaughter of the Spanish who had taken refuge there, and turning the tide against the uprising.

Beyond the infamy of its past, today Guanajuato boasts theaters and international festivals, such as the reknowned Cervantino, and a maze of picturesque narrow streets lined with Colonial and European inspired buildings.

There are sidewalk cafes reminiscent of Paris or Rome, traffic-free boulevards, probably the world’s first example of an underground expressway, the home of Diego Rivera and the greatest iconoclastic collection of the Lord of La Mancha kitsch since Graceland personified the genre, plus a whole lot of mummies.

Those are worth missing.

Drive from Guanajuato over the mountains and desert to the resort town of Tequisquiapan, a weekend refuge of many upper class Mexico City dwellers. The downtown streets are among the cleanest in all Mexico. The imposing colonial architecture isn’t all authentic, but the renovations mix well.

The beautiful plaza and its church are surrounded by upscale shops, restaurants, and posadas, small inns. Around the edge of the city’s center are the large resort hotels, some of them renovated colonial haciendas, usually a rambling two or three story ranch-style built around a central pool and garden.

The nearby mountains contain some of Mexico’s opal mines, where a bumpy ride, rattling down a cobblestone road, ends in the dusty streets that embrace the pueblito of Trinidad. Beyond the door of a nondescript house, spread out on a table in the kitchen for inspection, there is the treasure of trapped fire. Dozens of shimmering opals in matrix, an inferno of them, glare out from behind the stone in which they were created.

A few hours more of travel to circle Bernal and finish back in San Miguel. That city’s jewelry cases are full of the transformed flame from Trinidad, now burning in cold silver settings. The antique stores, usually located in rooms and a court of a beautiful colonial house, are crammed with actual and re-created colonial furnishings.

Decorative angels are a big item these days with designers; carved wooden winged angels hang from every ceiling, adorning every wall of these shops.

In considering the cosmic significance of angels to many cultures, especially Christian theology, questions arise as to what exactly are the representations sold in the shops?

As defined by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, there are three levels of hierarchy among angels, and atop the highest rung of the level closest to God are the Seraphim.

They can stand before God, but His white radiance is so brilliant that even they must fold their wings over their eyes. Each tier of angel has three levels of its own, only the lower two deal with mankind. In descending order of nearness to God after Seraphim they are Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and mere Angels.

Considering the almost bureaucratic distinctions, one wonders if angels came from the source of EVERYTHING flying by themselves…or in a ship of some kind…and whether they have navels like the carved angels in the shops?

And are they “innies” like the wooden ones or “outies” like the Navel of the Universe in Bernal?

The post Guanajuato: Journey to the center of the universe appeared first on MexConnect.

Photo Gallery: The sky cities of Queretaro

The Saturday movie-matinee feature of pre-television history introduced my entire generation to the mystery and adventure of lost cities lurking in the dank depths of the world’s remote jungles. Great white hunters slashed their way with machetes through vine-infested rain forests seeking the treasures of civilizations long gone from the earth.

In the third reel of the film, usually with the discovery of crumbling stone ruins, came the attacks from the painted, loincloth-wearing, spear-throwing indigenous natives, rising up to defend the sacred temples of the mysterious past from the interlopers. Steven Speilberg capitalized on this boyhood fantasy when he conceived the first film of the incredibly successful Indiana Jones trilogy.

The reality of that fictionalized romance lives on today in the Sierra Madre de Oriental mountains (the Mother Mountains of the East) of Querétaro state in Mexico, although they are perhaps better known as the Sierra Gorda, the fat mountains.

To be truthful, however, there are no great white hunters involved in this story; the indigenous natives wear jeans, drive pick-ups, and sell fruit drinks to the visitor; and the only use for machetes is to protect against the occasional snake.

But, for this story to be a movie cliffhanger, clearly there has to be some element of danger in visiting the sky cities of Ranas and Toluquilla perched atop ten thousand foot mountains in central Mexico. Unlike the Saturday afternoon movie thriller, however, the excitement in this real life version comes both from the journey and the discovery that history can be stranger than fiction.

The fact is that no one truly knows who built these sky cities, or exactly when, or what eventually happened to their inhabitants.

What is known is that only a portion of the ruins have been excavated and that the prime occupants were a privileged class of priests. The people are believed to have had contact with both the Toltec and Teotihuacan cultures and trails radiate down and out from the sky cities like the spokes of a wheel to all points of the compass.

Their society was uniquely centered on mining, in contrast to the rest of pre-Hispanic Meso-America. The minerals most sought after included cinnabar (mercury), calcite, and fluorite, the possession of which was a symbol of social rank and wealth.

The sky cities were abandoned in the tenth and eleventh centuries, long before their total available land for settlement was used up, and the mining and farming society gave way to nomadic hunters.

The ultimate inhabitants, the Chichimeca Indians, who discovered the abandoned cities nearly eight hundred years ago, were the only tribe in Mexico never subjugated during the Spanish Conquest, and they repulsed attempt after attempt to dislodge them from these heights.

Historians and experts working with the tourism department of the state of Querétaro have organized visits to the ruins that give travelers seeking adventure and knowledge, a comfortable alternative to weeks of hacking through the jungle. One expert, Dr. Morton Stith of San Miguel De Allende, who lectures at that city’s famed Biblioteca Publica, has visited the ruins numerous times and leads field trips to them. A participant in one of his tours can experience the mystery of the past and still be back to a comfortable posada, a local inn, in time for happy hour, a satisfying dinner, and a comfortable night’s sleep.

Unlike the more widely known and visited archeological sites dotting the Yucatan peninsula or Oaxaca state in Mexico, the sky cities were built atop mountainous ridges for both protection from attack and to isolate the priest class from the common people who lived far below in the valleys raising the food to support the aristocracy that overlooked them.

The only known comparison to these Mexican wonders would be Machu Picchu in Peru, but it was constructed as a final sanctuary for the Incas from the Spanish conquerors hundreds of years after the sky cities were abandoned by their builders.

Those who participate in this time-travel visit to the sky cities can testify to the difficulty in reaching Ranas and Toluquilla—it takes hours of travel across an ever-changing landscape to reach the sites. A new multi-million dollar highway climbs from the desolation of the high desert, ascending switch-back curves through Joshua tree groves that give way to pine forests swathed in mist. It is the only way in.

Then, across a great rift canyon, the pueblito of San Joaquin comes into view, a small terraced town built at the base of the peak where the ruins of Ranas are located.

There is a small, very basic hotel in town and nearby is a state park that provides camping facilities for the serious backpacker. Field trip participants are usually lodged at a state-run youth camp that provides comfortable dormitory style sleeping arrangements.

Ranas is the first ruin to be visited; just beyond the town, above the last house on the road up the mountain, the traveling gets difficult. The climb to the final summit to reach Ranas, “The Frogs,” is difficult but spectacular when finished.

While the ruins at Toluquilla, translated from the Nahuatl and Spanish as “Little Hunchback Peak,” are a short fifteen-minute drive from San Joaquin and located atop a long, undulating ridge line, the path to reach the summit is much worse than Ranas, but the rewards are greater.

The dirt and rock path from the tiny parking lot to the ruins of Toluquilla leads another three-hundred feet up a 45 degree slope to the summit. If the burros grazing on the steep slope of the mountain below the ruins sometimes have difficulty in making the turnaround to climb down to their home, one wonders how a tour bus is going accomplish the same thing just finding a place to stop to disgorge its passengers.

Even while one is climbing up the trail the view of the summit and its architectural treasures remains invisible until the very pinnacle is reached.

The struggle to reach the top is worth the effort when finally reached, for stretched out before the visitor on the serpentine ridge are the ruins of an ancient city: the chiseled-rock remnants of public squares, ball courts, temples, shrines, and the residences of the elite priesthood– all connected by cramped stone pathways.

The summit is no more than a hundred feet across at any one point; the cities cling to their ridge lines like a nervous tight-rope walker, just a step away from the abyss that lies hundreds of feet below. What has been uncovered of the ruins today is only a small fraction of what is there, perhaps only 15 percent.

Looking out from the pinnacle, distant mountains fade into the haze, looking much like a Chinese watercolor with their sharp peaks and steep valleys. The surrounding slopes reveal modern scenes of habitation, but they have been cultivated through the centuries since the Conquest. Pastures and corn fields, huge electrical transmission towers, and small pueblos nestled in the narrow valley floors are all visible from the Olympian heights of the sky cities.

What is remarkable is that the sky cities went unnoticed and untouched for centuries after they were abandoned. Of course the native people always knew they were there, but had no idea of their significance or origin, since their history was lost in the hundreds of years of Spanish occupation.

That is the true attraction and mystery of the sky cities. Any attempts to understand and reconstruct the culture and civilization that conceived these impressive edifices high above the jungle floor are mired in the accumulated dross due to the total lack of recorded knowledge about their existence.

It has only been within the last fifty years that sporadic attempts have been made to bring back the past glory of these mountain-top aeries through excavation and restoration. Recently the sites have been opened to tourism in the hope of generating the interest and revenues necessary for a full restoration.

Therein lies the double-edged sword. To increase public awareness through tourism will probably diminish the singular nature of this encounter with the past. Yet, without that awareness, these priceless examples of the genius of mankind could easily be vandalized and destroyed by either an unknowing populace or unscrupulous collectors.

The fact that the local government is utilizing expert assistance testifies to their commitment to proceed to the goal without jeopardizing the conclusion.

Certainly, these sky cities bear no resemblance to the great ruins of the Yucatan, whose temples tower over the jungle floor. The tallest partially restored pyramid of the sky cities stands less than one hundred feet above its ridge top. But scale and size pale when considering the sky cities’ empty courtyards, silent ball courts, vacant pyramids, and deserted corridors. What is revealed is a more fulfilling and powerful experience than the better-known archeological sites to the south due to that very fact—the absence of an overwhelming number of visitors.

The sky cities resonate with loneliness.

It’s as if the visitor was the great white hunter from those Saturday afternoon action adventure movies. These stone cities laid out before the visitor are extraordinarily quiet—only the hum of the locust, the calls of birds, and the wind whispering through the over-arching pines breaks the silence.

Turning the next corner down the narrow stone walkway from the plaza you expect the ferocious painted face of a native to suddenly leap into your path and utter a blood-chilling scream before plunging a spear in your direction.

The thought seizes your mind about spending a full moon night there, silently listening for the voices of the past to break through the symphony of sounds and cast you back to an unrecorded time.

To a time when the gods walked upon the mountain tops.

The post The sky cities of Queretaro appeared first on MexConnect.

Photo Gallery: Aqui es México

A written and photographic experience

Of all the most endearing and enduring charms that draw travelers back to Mexico, the effect that the country can have upon a sense of humor is the most magical.

It arises out of an initial attitude of annoyance and frustration by the first-time visitor toward anyone or anything that appears to behave or operate in a manner other than “normal.” To that visitor it is all foreign. Over time, the personal sense matures into a recognition that the people or things are odd indeed, but quite Mexican for Mexico.

Once that leap of faith is accomplished, the fractiousness of Mexican life becomes as observable as the skull of death does atop a carved wooden skeleton. There are three words for it: sentido del humor, sense of humor.

Once this state of mind is achieved, it is not uncommon to encounter snippets of life in Mexico that cause almost instantaneous vocal laughter and internal mirth on the part of the observer. Of course, everyone else nearby will think that the outburst of merriment is muy loco.

The following five examples may help serve to visualize and understand the insightful vision leading up to the inevitable climax. One of them is quite dramatic, another quite charming on the surface of it, and they all could be classified as either romantic tragedy or black comedy.

Item #1.

In an attempt to combine efforts among Mexican states and the neighbors of Central America, Mundo Maya, the Mayan World tourism project, was initiated to bring the traveler back to Chiapas and other notable sites throughout Southern Mexico.

Chiapas, of course, has been in the news these days because of an indigenous uprising over five years ago that has been in on-and-off negotiations between rebels and government officials with 25,000 troops still in the field and the masked revolutionaries hiding out in the jungle.

To prove that things have indeed changed and progress is being made, a decision by the tourism officials placed the opening ceremonies of a promotional tour of the Mundo Maya’s five Mexican states, at El Chorreadero waterfall near Chiapa de Corzo.

This magnificent location at the base of fractured-stone cliffs, rising 600 feet above the natural amphitheater created by the crashing cascade, was a photo-perfect setting for federal and state tourism officials, so they assembled the symphony orchestra and chorale from the Arts and Sciences University of Chiapas, and assorted dignitaries and reporters.

A noted Chiapan poet who participated in the inauguration, Elva Macias, was quoted as saying, “The living cultures in this state, including its music, clothing, language and customs, are just a few of the attractions that will interest travelers who come to the Mundo Maya.”

Not exactly poetry, but encouraging words none-the-less.

Obviously the venue at the base of a towering, pounding waterfall, its drops of mist clinging to the air, the musical instruments and the faces of those gathered there, played a major part in this production.

And what a production there was. The canyon walls reverberated with the rolling melodies of “Water Memoirs,” an original piece composed and conducted by Federico Alvarez del Toro. The imaginative composition included two notable passages, the first, a tit-for-tat showdown between amplified electric guitars pitted against marimba soloists banging their wooden mallets, flooded the canyon with deafening music.

The second exceptional passage involved the trumpeting of conch shell horns and screaming electric guitars backed by the entire symphony orchestra and chorale. It rattled the very granite walls surrounding the waterfall, so much so that rocks began to give way and crash down the cliff toward the celebration.

Flute soloist Marielena Arizpe was injured by one such boulder dislodged by the cacophony in the canyon. She was reported to have been evacuated by the Red Cross and was in stable condition later in the day. Festivities, foreshortened by events, were concluded with soldiers firing off cartridges filled with confetti.

Exit the tourist bureau bureaucrat who thought it all up.

Item #2.

Any visitor to Mexico, whether walking or driving a car, knows to look up at the walls of buildings at each street corner. Half-way up the wall, painted on a black background, is a white arrow, either one –> way, or two <—> way, or a “do not enter Ø” sign will confront them.

This procedure is enormously necessary in the colonial cities region of Mexico, the very heartland of its history, agriculture and industry. The streets of many of the cities that comprise this region are old, very dark and narrow, and constructed with cobblestones. The corners are blind, and the streets themselves undulate with topes, speed bumps that can flatten a car’s undercarriage or bend a frame when navigated too swiftly.

However, the selection process in determining how the traffic grid is to function escapes Aristotelian logic. One-way streets intersect with two-way streets, dead-ending in cul-de-sacs that turn around into glorietas, – traffic circles going nowhere.

In an attempt to spend as little effort, gas and time as required to arrive at the requested destination, a typical taxi driver, upon intersecting with a one-way street that prohibits forward movement, will simply turn the car around, slam it into reverse, and drive backward up the one-way, in effect observing the signs and the law.

Item #3.

Another beautiful sunny day on the Pacific coast had begun at noon as usual for the tourists. On the drive toward town they spotted a restaurant that looked inviting located just off the highway and built directly on a broad white beach. An empty sand-packed parking lot, large enough for fifty cars, was lined with wind-beaten lime-yellow splotched palmettos lashing about in the cool on-shore breeze. The smell of salt spray mingled with the slightly off-smell of kitchen grease and fish was apparent the moment the threshold was crossed.

The red-tiled dining room featured an open wall of French doors facing the sea, with the invading wind rustling the crisp white table cloths and spinning the suspended shell sculptures slowly in one direction, then the compounded string-power overcame the breeze to unwind the shells in reverse. A wide balcony fronted on the sand, and a stone staircase descended to the blinding, blistering playa.

All-in-all, it was an ideal location for a leisurely seafood lunch. Of course in Mexico, the main meal, in the early afternoon, is the comida, but that rule does not seem to apply to resort areas and the restaurants serving them.

Although European visitors mimic the Mexican way, gringo tourists demand a big evening meal, so the local people adapt their kitchen schedules to respond to the trade. If there are more gringos than Europeans and Mexicans, then the big meal is at night.

This restaurant initially appeared to cater to the national or European tourist, not the gringo. But the assumption that business would be in full-blast proved terribly wrong because no one except the help inhabited the space at that hour. This must be a gringo-phased kitchen. Nevertheless, the staff cheerfully whisked the American tourists to a cool table near the open sea-front terrace.

“¿Tomar?” The waiter swiftly took the drink orders down on a small slip of paper. The drinks arrived with all due speed, considering no other customers were competing with the overly gracious help for attention.

After a second round of drinks the meal was ordered, each selection full of the wonderful bounty of the sea so plentiful along the Mexican Riviera. The pounding surf grabbed the attention of the customers and so they ventured out upon the beach, grasping botellas of cervezas as they hop-scotched across the bright burning sand to the water’s edge.

Time and tide came and went, bottles were drained dry, and their hunger increased. A swift return to the table revealed no food, but an anxious waiter ready to take another drink order. His fellow workers, meanwhile, had huddled together outside the main entrance to the restaurant where a steady stream of cars and taxis would arrive, but no one would exit them.

Instead, as each vehicle stopped, a package or paper bag would be handed to one of the help, who in turn would run into the restaurant and immediately enter the kitchen through swinging doors. From behind those doors came the sounds of a kitchen at work, so why not have another round, and move this party to another table because the sun is really hot pouring through those open doors onto this one.

The afternoon just got away from itself, the hours passed as quickly as the waiter was available to replace a finished drink. The flow of cars finally stopped. The dining room still remained empty except for the original customers.

Four hours after deciding upon this as the typical Mexican restaurant, a wonderful meal of just-bought, freshly-caught, just-unfrozen food that had been arriving at the front door since soon after the order was placed was finally served. Travel experts say that when eating in a foreign land, it is wisest to eat just-cooked food. In Mexico, the food is so fresh the kitchen doesn’t even have it when you order.

Item #4.

The classic VW beetle parked at the stone curb, lucky to find even such a small space available on the busy street. The doors of the car swung open to disgorge the passengers.

At first, the event took on no special significance, until the number of people piling out of the basic four seat car became apparent. The assembled count of passengers exiting the car ended at seven, of all body sizes and ages.

A casual foreign observer making a sotto voce count as the disgorging continued caught the attention of one of the passengers, a young woman, and she began laughing and sharing it with her passengers, most likely her total immediate family.

She repeats the count back in English to her fellow travelers, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.” The family proceeds to laugh, not with rancor or negativity, but simply in amusement that someone would find the incident unusual. It is simply another one of those special shared moments regardless of cross-cultural differences that transcend the human condition.

Item #5.

This final vignette will reveal volumes about the necessity for a sense of humor in Mexico.

The expatriate woman who hired a maid was extremely satisfied with her job performance. The maid accomplished everything in fine order, but had one fatal flaw. She always arrived for work a half-hour late.

After being berated by her employer about coming to work promptly at ten, but time-after-time she continued to arrive late, the maid finally became frustrated and spoke to the woman.

“Señora, what time would you have me arrive? Would it be eight, nine, ten? It is of no importance to me.”

The Señora says ten o’clock is all she’s asking.

To which the maid replied, ” Si, Señora, but I can’t be on time.”

The post Aqui es México appeared first on MexConnect.

Photo Gallery: A bay, two towns, three beaches

Deep down in all of our hearts, there is that desire to escape the everyday world in which we feel trapped and find our personal paradise. Or, to be more precise considering the limitless alternatives of that thought, how would one conceive of their own paradise? Perhaps to some it would be a deep, dark forest high in the mountains, alive with the sounds of unseen wild creatures. To others it might be an uncomplicated place by the seashore, quiet except for the surf rolling onto a gentle beach, and beautiful in the simple but elegant style that nature provides.

That second thought is what my heart sought, and that’s what I found. I offer up its story with the understanding to the reader that this is a very special place, and I must put entry restrictions upon you if you choose to visit it.

Only those people seeking a place to go where there is nothing to do, and enjoy doing nothing while there, are allowed in. Only those who greet the day and every one on the street as they pass with a smile may enter. Only those who do not need television to pass the night, but prefer instead conversation over a dinner of fresh caught fish and fine wine with friends, and later, to read a good book that lulls you to sleep, will find this paradise open to them.

Imagine entering the Bahía Tenacatita on your own sailboat just as the sun has set at your back and the lights of civilization off your bow guide you toward your anchorage. To be truthful, there are not that many lights along the great curving bay. To your right, off the starboard bow, is the largest concentration. It is the village of La Manzanilla. Directly ahead are the lights of two resort complexes, one resting on the sand of Playa de Los Angeles Locos, the other a complex of villas that climbs a rocky point high above the breaking surf. To port, to the left, a number of rocky islets mark the beginning of Tenacatita, a broad sweeping beach lined with rustic palapa restaurants. You slowly slip into a quiet bay midway between Tenacatita and the resorts and drop anchor in a calm shelter.

Taking the dinghy ashore the next morning, you begin your adventure of exploring all the wonders of this quiet backwater known as the Costa Allegre, the happy coast. You begin, as I did, at the southern-most part of the bay, the fishing village of La Manzanilla.

There is really not much to the town. It is off the main coastal road, Highway 200, that links Puerto Vallarta to the large, busy seaport of Manzanillo. But what will be found down a one mile long turnoff to the beach is a small village that offers a sense of serenity, a quiet walk on the beach at sunrise or sunset and a peace of mind that comes with the realization that the world doesn’t have to be so complicated.

In other words, this is a paradise that my heart could imagine.

The one unpaved main street of sand splits at a small triangular plaza into two that meet again in the square in front of the church. A small jardín occupies the space, crowned with an unusual gazebo whose concrete pillars are overflowing with stylized creatures of the sea. A few side roads go off from this square either up a river valley, the streambed dry except for the rainy season, or up the steep hill behind the church overlooking the jardín.

Few vehicles travel these few streets. The traffic consists mostly of people on foot or riding bicycles, the preferred mode of transportation in the town, it seems.

The beach curves from a rocky point near the square around the huge bay, stretching for miles as far as the eye can see. The water’s edge is lined with coconut palms and small beach homes and rustic restaurants in the town proper, but beyond the last palapa, only the sand and palms are visible until you see the villas of Punta Serena high upon their rocky bluff.

Two notable events in recent years have shaped this town into what exists today; first came the quiet arrival of foreigners who decided to settle down and make it a home, notably a mysterious Italian Contessa and a German couple with their young son.

The Contessa had a vision of turning the town into a mini Malibu, complete with expensive houses lining the beach. The couple opened a small inn.

It took a violent act of nature, in this case the thunderous arrival of a huge tsunami that laid waste to most of the beachfront property, to make her vision a reality.

The two events are linked, for after the tidal wave, more foreigners came and purchased property that had been abandoned, and began a rebuilding project that changed the face and beach front of the town forever. But it did not become the Malibu look-a-like that the Contessa had imagined. It became something quite different.

Now, large multi-level apartments and condominiums climb the steep hillside above the beach; inventively designed homes crown the top of the hills or nestle in small canyons. The local population turned away from what had been a fishing economy to embrace the new construction boom. Where once there had been little work available, now high paying jobs were everywhere.

They began the process of rebuilding their own homes with the income earned, and soon any visible scars from the sea-borne disaster disappeared. More foreigners came, many with homes in San Miguel de Allende, and saw what was happening, and soon a small expatriate community was created, all like-minded people who loved the place, the locals and the sea.

And so, La Manzanilla began a new existence.

Apart from the sound of the rolling surf and the frequent passage of shrill, squawking flocks of brilliant green parrots, the only noise that intrudes upon the solitude of the town is a musical gas truck alerting residents to its appearance.

One typically Mexican phenomenon, the lack of cambio or monetary change for services or goods purchased, is surprisingly missing from this town. It is a small blessing, but noteworthy in that there is no bank to be found. Nor is there a gas station. With only one cantina, Saturday night is a relatively quiet time, a fact that the town’s two policemen appreciate.

Quite comfortable accommodations can be found for the visitor, either rentals directly on the beachfront, or condos in the hills above town with magnificent views of the beach and bay. The following three establishments offer special charms and comforts.

At the rocky point near the jardín, nestled on a craggy overlook, is Casa Maguey, a small inn containing three distinctive casitas. It has been owned and managed by Helga Lehmen for fourteen years and provides solitude and privacy from the town proper, although the beach is only steps from it’s bayside entrance.

On the hillside overlooking the church and jardín is Brisas del Mar, although if you asked any local, few would know it by that name. It is one of the largest structures in town and contains two one-bedroom apartments and two two-bedroom units, all fully furnished with kitchens, VCR’s and satellite TV with air conditioning provided for the bedrooms. But, because of its location high on the hill, the sea breezes cool the rooms naturally.

On its rooftop is a large open lounge area with an infinity pool and crowned by a large palapa. The terrace is complete with small kitchen and bar for preparing food and drink to entertain, or it is simply a place to lay back and enjoy the view and sunset.

At the other end of town, away from the beach up a short street, are seven apartments owned and operated by Maria Castilozo. They are furnished in a rustic country style, with a number of terraces and patios available to all the guests. Maria is actively involved in civic affairs, promoting ecological efforts to keep the town clean and protect its environment, a dedication first brought to my attention by the proprietor of the town’s really fine restaurant.

Martín spent 19 years in the restaurant business, mostly in Guadalajara, at one of that city’s finest establishments. He finally decided to set out on his own, and went to Barra de Navidad with the hopes of opening his restaurant.

He was disappointed at what he found there, and so traveled a little further up highway 200 until he found a fishing village in need of his services. He opened his namesake, Martín’s Restaurant, five years ago, first on a location near the jardín, but then decided his patrons would appreciate the sea view and breezes, and so built a two-story palapa near the rocky point and riverbed.

He personally oversees the kitchen, buying fresh produce and seafood daily and preparing specials each night. But, if a guest wishes something not on the menu, he will do his best to fulfill the request.

If you walk the beach away from town, you will ultimately encounter what remains of a hotel that was destroyed in the tidal wave. The property clearly was quite large and developed at the time, but now only a hulk of concrete, one end collapsed upon itself, remains. A chain link fence surrounds it, and one can only speculate as to its future.

A little further on, and you reach Bocas de Iguana, a campsite and trailer park.

Playa de Los Angeles Locos is not named for some demented celestial beings, but rather for a group of wealthy gringos from Southern California who first developed the site and were regarded by the locals as crazy because they would fly back and forth in their plane to the site. They constructed two distinct and separate properties and targeted each to different clientele. Both properties face a small bay, and it is here that most sailors entering Bahía Tenacatita find safe haven and a quiet anchorage. The resorts changed hands in time and now are know as The Blue Bay Club Los Angeles Locos and Punta Serena Villas and Spa.

The larger of the two is The Blue Bay Club. It is an all-inclusive family style resort that fronts of the wide beach. It contains a number of restaurants and also a large disco. Overlooking this complex are the villas of Punta Serena, a hideaway designed for adults only. It also is all-inclusive and features clothing optional areas, cliff side Jacuzzis, spa treatments and a Temazcal, a Mexican style sweat lodge including purification ceremonies twice weekly. Although designed as the ultimate, intimate escape, guests can also use all of the facilities of The Blue Bay Club. Nearby a heliport stands ready so that guests can be whisked away by air if desired.

In stark contrast to these resorts, Playa Tenacatita is a simple, South Seas type of laid back, nothing much going on kind of place. The broad, sweeping beach is lined with modest palapa restaurants, and the nearby rocky coves that mark the end of the bay provide for excellent snorkeling. If you wish, you can hire a small boat to take you further out to the islands of Colorada, Coocina, San Andrés, Pasavere, Novilla, Esfinge, San Pedro, San Agustín and La Negrita. All are excellent fishing and diving spots.

But perhaps the best that can be said about Playa Tenacatita is that in its simplicity, the best part of living is merely enjoying life over a good meal of fresh seafood and a cold beer. And isn’t that what paradise should be all about?

One final footnote to this record of paradise. It should be mentioned that all along the sweeping beaches, or more correctly, just behind them, are brackish, salt-water lagoons. These lagoons are filled with all manner of exotic life, including Caimanes. You probably know them better by their English language name: Crocodiles. Enjoy paradise, but watch your step.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Rebecca Bruns who guided many readers to their personal Mexican beach paradise.

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Photo Gallery: Hidden time revisited: Puerto Escondido

It was an evening to remember. The final chorus of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” bombarded the barren shore, the vocal crescendos punctuated by nature’s own rhythm section: the waves crashing on Zicatela beach.

Off in the distance, scattered among the sand dunes of this world famous Mexican surfing “pipeline,” huge bonfires spewed Stygian sparks high into the star-studded sky.

The faces of revelers reflected the fiery orange light. Singular groups of people huddled on the sand, their celebratory voices mixing with the recorded classical chorus, adding to it Mexican folksongs, Canadian drinking songs, and Italian arias into the convoluted musical din.

And then, se armo la gorda, all hell broke loose; the velvet dome was shattered with huge, multi-colored explosions- pirotecnia, the fireworks! The sparkling, glowing remnants were flung into the blackness like spider-webs, the strands twinkling as they fell to earth. Their winking mimicked the anchor lights of the fishing boats gently rocking on the bay.

Puerto Escondido really knows how to show in the New Year.

Enormous sparklers, as long as a child’s arm, were rammed into the yellow sand. They crackled and spurted sparks as they stood, sentry-like, between the water’s edge and the beachfront road.

Skyrockets lashed to a rickety wooden wheel hung from a roadside bush spun in an incandescent circle. Suddenly, the flaming hoop broke free and cartwheeled across the road onto the sand.

Mangy dogs, fleeing for their very lives, added howls of panic to the racket.

Across the bay, along Avenida Perez Gasga, in the cantinas, hotels and restaurants lining the red-tiled pedestrian street, a decidedly mixed bag of celebrants helped usher in another year of quiet but continued success for this tiny, unbeknownst, authentic Oaxacan fishing village.

But all good things must come to any end, and when the champagne ran out and the bands finished playing, everyone found themselves to bed until another dawn.

And another plaintive dawn bugle reveille, executed off-key but with authoritarian certainty, all but muffled by the pounding marching drums from the cliff-side army barracks overlooking the beach.

For the fishermen and their women though, last night’s festivities and the town’s lethargic re-awakening had little to do with them. They have been working, fishing the Pacific for its bounty.

Before the final drum stick roll is struck, the final bugle note blown, they have drawn their boats up onto Playa Principal and begun to unload the evening’s catch for cleaning and sale. The first of the day’s visitors make their way from breakfast to the beach to witness the market as the rising morning sun begins to heat the sand.

At times it becomes a bloody spectacle on the sand while the women gut the glistening flacks of the marlins. Mounds of red snapper and yellow fin, scattered on plastic sheets next to the beached boats, await inspection and purchase. Tonight the fish will re-appear on the plates of diners at countless small cafes and crowded restaurants.

Puerto Escondido is no longer hidden from the traveler, and even tourists have been showing up, drawn by the relaxed pace and small town atmosphere. Founded during the great depression as a coffee export port, even today the resident population is only pushing 40,000 souls.

But there is no master development plan, the contrary genesis of resorts like Cancun and Ixtapa; there is no narrow vision of growth up from the muck of mangrove swamps to the splendor of high-rise palaces.

Puerto Escondido’s growth will not be the end of a good thing. It is a real place with real people with real hopes and real dreams.

The number of available hotel rooms, though increasing, would hardly accommodate as many passengers as fill an average cruise ship. And, thankfully, cruise ships bypass this Pacific port, primarily because there is no dock to come ashore.

Most of the newer hotel construction has occurred north of the city, near the airport. A city ordinance prohibits buildings of more than three stories, effectively limiting construction of major facilities. Within town and along the beaches that stretch southward to the horizon much is as it has been for years.

Except for the new sushi bar.

There is a key to the charm of Puerto Escondido that keeps its regular visitors returning, all the time vowing not to tell their friends about it – simply put, the place is not easy to get to.

The drive from Acapulco down the coastal highway takes seven hours. The rutted road from Oaxaca city traverses many mountain ranges in its descent to the coast, and can hardly be considered an “improved” highway as the map legends would indicate.

Air service exists between Mexico City, Oaxaca and Acapulco, but varies with regularity, making connections a matter of timing.

For those who have seen the changes here over the last twenty years, however, they are profound. In 1981 Paul Cleaver opened a small 10-room inn behind the huge rock formation that serves as a boundary to mark the town’s beaches from the surfing beaches. The inn was named the Hotel Santa Fe in honor of that New Mexican town.

It was the beginning of a success story that seems to have no end.

The inn, hidden amidst an oasis of coconut palms, was expanded in the following years, adding a small blue-tiled pool, boutique, vegetarian restaurant and more rooms. Historically, except for the summer months when Mexico’s brush with the hurricane season occurs, the hotel is almost fully booked, mostly by the same people year-after-year for weeks or months at a time.

To provide for newcomers to this hidden port, an expansion project for the hotel added more rooms, another swimming pool, and an additional restaurant and bar. Paul trained most of the staff himself from the hotel’s opening day, and he proudly called them “family.”

But the increased success, and with it the workload, had a cost. The future caught up with him, and he remembered how it all began, and so he decided to leave the hotel to build a small inn of his own located on the bluff behind the Hotel Santa Fe.

Much of the experience of Puerto Escondido is the sensation of “family,” but not in the sense that it is a family vacation resort, although to many Mexicans it most certainly is.

But family in the sense that it is still under the control and management of the locals. Other beach towns have a detached, corporate, designer-perfect feeling about them, an impersonal attitude that can stifle even the legendary charm of the Mexicans.

Here the smiles are genuine, the interest sincere.

Many notable people visit today, although Paul clarifies that they, “are not famous. Famous people go to places to be seen.”

Among the notables he counts as a personal friend is Diana Kennedy, without question the leading North American expert on the cuisine’s of Mexico, Rick Bayless not withstanding. A frequent visitor to Puerto Escondido, her influence helped drive the menu offered at the Hotel Santa Fe to be decidedly natural and concentrate on vegetarian.

Good food in town abounds around every corner, with choices ranging from ocean-breeze cooled palapas on the beach to linen and silver at a rooftop bistro atop a hillside hotel.

At a small family owned restaurant named Meson de la Costa, in the market area of town above the coastal highway, Rosa and Carlos prepare meals. They work in a visible kitchen, cooled by a large rotating fan that is immobilized, by choice or failure, leaving only the cooks to bask in its breeze.

But the meals that they prepare are like the ones that one would find on the dining room table at home. Diana Kennedy sampled some and declared that, “the cooking came from the heart.”

The heart of Puerto Escondido still beats to the slow rhythm of nature, the tides and the seasons. Would more people knowing about it ruin it?

No more, perhaps, than having an academy-award winning director come and film a motion picture there and then entitle it: Puerto Escondido. In the past, movies have had a profound influence on Mexican fishing villages. Puerto Vallarta has never been the same since Night of the Iguana splashed that small village across the screen.

Setting aside the local residents of Puerto Escondido who smell commercial advantage as a result, the regular visitors who escape to this village understand the pride, but fear the outcome.

Speaking about the future, it is clear that there is no universally accepted version of the actual path development will take along this cactus-bound coast.

When confronted with the problems that increased numbers of new tourists will impose upon the town’s facilities, one front desk manager who works for a small hotel fronting Zicatela beach shook his head and acknowledged that there will indeed be problems. But he still held to the faith that somehow it will be controlled.

“Claro” – clearly – he says, as if the great truths were finally visible through all the confusion. It is so different from saying, “I understand.” If it is clear, there is no doubt, it is as transparent as the sea.

“Claro,” he says again, confirming what you already knew, without question. Change is constant, like the tides.

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Photo Gallery: Oaxaca, The Spirit of Mexico

Review of “Oaxaca, The Spirit of Mexico” – Photographs by Judith Cooper Haden, introduction by Phil Borges, text by Matthew Jaffe; published by Artisan, 2002

All journeys of discovery have a beginning and an end. But the joyful experience of discovery itself has no limits. One of the greatest experiences of discovery is to place your self into a totally alien, foreign and perhaps an initially threatening environment and let life take its course.

The introduction to “Oaxaca” speaks to the very essence of what this book, a stunning collection of photographs and vivid narration, is all about.

It is all about the journey, all about allowing the surroundings to engulf you and your senses. It is all about becoming aware, as an animal is aware, of the life and death that swirls about every second of the day and night. It concerns all of the spirits that surround us, no matter the form – human, animal, tree or stone.

This particular journey of discovery portrays Oaxaca, the city. But this book is not simply about the architecture and people that occupy that place. It deals with history and deeply held convictions; it reveals a gift to the people who live there to use their God-given talents in creating a work of painting or sculpture, or a beautiful weaving for the floor, or a wonderful meal for the table.

Within the five different chapters to the book are five different and revealing aspects of the spirit of Mexico. The first encompasses the 2,000-year history of Oaxaca. The second reveals simple but eloquent street scenes of the city. The third details the works of art crafted by different artisans. Then we are taken to the clamor and chaos of the mercado to feast on the food and rejoice in the faces around us. The book ends with a celebration of death and life, a centermost anchor of the Mexican belief system, a festival known as The Day of the Dead.

In Corazon Del Pueblo, we see the city at dawn, during the early morning awakening when people stop, take their coffee and a shoeshine and then go about their daily lives. Along the way we encounter renowned artists such as Rodolfo Morales, to whom the book is dedicated, and many others: Francisco Toledo, Margarita Bautista, Isaac Vasquez, Juan Antonio Garcia and Dõna Rosa, all who create their work – Hecho a Mano.

We join in the creation of their contributions to the culture and history of Oaxaca and its people and begin to understand the significance of a life dedicated to the celebration of all that the past has left as a lesson and a legacy.

The photographic images of all these experiences of discovery are eloquent. The narrative examines and explains the nuances of Mexico and its people, a puzzle that is a riddle for most Norte Americanos.

One looks at this work and begs for more, for there is always more beauty in the details. There is more to Oaxaca then the city, too, but then, perhaps, that is a work that will come later. For those who love the country and people of Mexico, “Oaxaca, The Spirit of Mexico” is a book that reveals the hidden layers of a place but still leaves hope for more journeys of discovery. Let there be sequels.

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