The Pre-Hispanic, the Colonial, the Royal Roads
of Morelos and Puebla
By Julia Taylor © Julia Taylor 2007
Photos by Miguel Angel Cuevas© Miguel Angel Cuevas 2007
Click on pics for large view
The royal roads were first utilized by Mesoamerican cultures in central Mexico.
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16th century convent routes between Morelos and Puebla are listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
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Some narrow trails are hardly visible.
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Holy water in convent fonts
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Preparations for the Day of the Dead.
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The experience is unforgettable.
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Join us to experience the other Mexico and the roads our ancestors traveled.
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Step by step, all roads are formed by those who walk them. The roads of Mexico were first formed by native people walking from city to city. These roads - some paved - were used for conducting warfare, cultural interchange, and commerce. Later these same roads were trod by the heavy horses of the conquering Spaniards and the sandals of the missionaries. Still later, they were traveled by mestizo tradesmen and religious pilgrims. Today, these roads are known throughout Mexico as caminos reales, meaning "royal" or "official roads," sometimes translated as "the king's highways."
In Morelos, just as throughout the rest of Mexico, Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries built their convents near existing native populations to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. After the network of convents shifted into power, the routes that connected them were used for centuries by the friars and people, alike. Now, with the relatively recent construction of modern highways, the routes are being forgotten.
But something special is happening in Morelos because it is home to part of the last surviving network of convents in Mexico. In 1994, 14 sixteenth century convents (11 in Morelos and 3 in Puebla) were listed as World Heritage sites by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). This did a lot to ensure the survival of these convents as important cultural and architectural resources, but some essence of the network that makes them special as a whole is still being lost. This is because visitors reach the convents by car, traveling on highways that don't follow the original routes.
Miguel Ángel Cuevas Olascoaga, a 35 year old resident of Morelos, aims to revive the network itself by re-opening the routes that tie it together for the people of Morelos and the world to enjoy. Cuevas has his bachelor's degree in architecture, his master's in conservation of cultural heritage monuments, and is currently pursuing his doctorate in architecture and urban design. His thesis in progress is on the design of cultural tourism routes. He hopes that twice a year, groups of people will be able to walk the king's highways from the slopes of Popocatepetl through northern Morelos, visiting the World Heritage convents as they go.
Of course, before he can do this, Cuevas has to know exactly where these royal roads are. As part of his research, he and a researcher from INAH (the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, The National Institute of Anthropology and History) spent 9 days walking 242 kilometers (just over 150 miles), visiting all 14 convents and getting lost only twice. They took with them a compass, GPS, video camera, water, and maps. There are few places to stay along the route so, like the original pilgrims, they asked permission to sleep in the huerto (garden out back of the convent) or in the portal de los peregrines (a covered area connected to the chapel, usually to the right of the main entrance, built to shelter pilgrims).
As they went, they identified the road construction to confirm that they had found the actual route. The original roads took three forms. The largest was the calzada, which was as wide as a modern road (8 to 10 meters). Calzadas were generally unpaved, but were occasionally paved with stones at the entrance of certain towns. They were used for the transport of people walking, domesticated animals, men on horseback, carts pulled by animals, and cattle. The middle sized roads are called caminos and were 3 or 4 meters wide and used by people walking or those on horseback. Less than half of these were paved with stones, with the pavement extending no farther than 10 kilometers from the town center. Finally, there were veredas, which were no wider than a meter and used by people on foot. Cuevas and his partner identified the paving techniques, looking for those that originated in the 16th century.
Despite the fact that people rarely use these routes to go from town to town anymore, they are still known as the royal roads. To get a general idea of where to start looking, they often asked the older locals, "¿Cuál es el camino real que llega a …?" ("Which is the king's highway to…?") The older people know the roads from the days before cars when they used to travel on horseback, transport their goods using mules, or walk to the next town.
In fact, every city of Mexico has its king's highways, hidden within its fabric. And every city of Mexico has its old men who remember these roads and can tell their stories. These royal roads have been built on, around, and in many cases, re-built for modern traffic, but they are still there because people still travel them, whether they realize it or not. Grandfathers still remember the days when people hired arrieros (muleteers) with their mules or donkeys to carry their harvested corn, beans, or grains from the field to market. Arrieros traveled the royal roads back and forth from town to town, kicking up dust in the dry season and getting coated in mud during the rainy season.
Imagine a Mexican town you know well. Where might the king's highway have started or ended? Imagine the men outside of town, resting near the road or playing cards or having cock fights in the shade of a tree. Imagine all the stories of adventures and misadventures, the busy daytime traffic, shuffling and clopping along, hurrying at dusk to get into a safe place. Imagine the lonely road at night, a worried family bringing a sick person to the biggest town in the region, with no flashlights - guided by the moon.
Grandpas still tell stories about events along the royal roads. They know who fought whom at the designating fighting spot or where the devil or La Llorona (the ghost of a crying woman) habitually appeared to drunks who traveled too often at night. The trees, rocks, and curves in the road are the big landmarks of the past, and today we pass by and know so little of them. Since the only way a road can die is if people stop traveling it, Cuevas' project will help to keep a small portion of these king's highways alive. . .
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Julia Taylor lives in Cuernavaca with her husband and their young son. She is the author of Mexico: The Trick is Living Here, with inside information for those who want to work, live, and retire in Mexico.For more information, visit Home Sweet Mexico.
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