Inside Mexico On February 20th, 1943, after a couple of weeks of ominous earth tremors and strange underground sounds, the Paricutín volcano in Michoacán, erupted among prayers and rogations, fire displays and intense noise. The church bells of San Juan Parangaricutiro, five kilometers down the narrow valley, rang by themselves, dancing with the moving ground. […]
Continue Readingoriginally – galleries/247 – with no article Paricutin is a famous volcano that popped up in a farmer’s field in 1943 and continued to grow until 1952 to form a large cinder cone. Collateral flowing lava covered the valley and inundated adjacent villages of San Salvador and San Juan. The flow was slow enough so no […]
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Certainly Sr., fortunately here in Michoacán, we still have handcrafts, our heart and these hands. And with these we can do a little bit of everything…” – Source: “El quehacer de un pueblo” (“The tasks of a town”), Casa de las Artesanías de Michoacán (The Michoacan House of Handcrafts). This article is a guide to the highways and […]
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This charming little beach town located on Pacific Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit, is only a forty-minute drive north of Puerto Vallarta. Sayulita has exploded in popularity as an alternative beach vacation destination during the past few years and celebrity sightings are becoming rather common place. You just know that Sayulita is special, even before arriving, because […]
Continue ReadingThe most common way to visit Copper Canyon is by train, which runs from Los Mochis to Chihuahua – one of the few remaining passenger trains in Mexico. While this rail trip offers spectacular views, passengers do not get an opportunity to go deep into the canyon. Therefore, a few years ago, I opted to […]
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For a while I’ve been asking myself how it’s possible that I keep finding new natural wonders to write about after 25 years of living near Guadalajara. So, one day I sat down with a map and drew a circle around the city, with a radius of about 250 kilometers, nicely encompassing many of the […]
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From Cholula we are in the city of Puebla in a matter of minutes. Though Puebla is a city of maybe 1.5 million people, it is not a city of tall buildings of steel and glass. The old part of town surrounds the main plaza or ‘zocalo’. The plaza is dominated by a magnificent Cathedral and buildings […]
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Elvia Silva Bartolo believes her big ceramic pots have a pretty good chance of winning a prize at the 46th annual Tianguis y Concurso de Artesania de Domingo de Ramos on April 9 in Uruapan, Michoacán. Bartolo lives in the village of Zipiajo where she and other artisans practice an ancient Purepecha craft in which they make […]
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The Cathedral of Santiago in Saltillo faces the Plaza de Armas where young couples relax on iron benches surrounded by manicured gardens and children chasing pigeons. Streams of water rise from a fountain into gentle arcs in the sunlight, and a young man sells paintings of feathered Indians, the Virgin Mary, and Mexican villages with […]
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A cool waterfall rushes over rocks into a pool surrounded by Boston ferns, split-leaf philodendron and magnolias in the desert of the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Turtles bask on the shore, iguanas stare through a window into the herpetarium in the next room, and dinosaur eggs lay nestled beneath lush foliage. The biodome of […]
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