Many visitors in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, realize that the quaint mountain town, aside from being a destination in itself, is a perfect jumping-off point for dozens of side-trips. Surrounding indigenous villages, the Lagos de Montebello, and even Palenque, four hours away, are accessible for ambitious travelers. But not many tourists venture deeper […]
Continue ReadingTwo sites within an hour’s drive south of Zacatecas make it well worthwhile to linger at least an extra day when visiting this splendid colonial treasure, described in a previous Mexico Connect article. ( Zacatecas) The two sites in question are La Quemada (The Burnt) and Jerez (Sherry). La Quemada grew into the largest pre-Columbian settlement […]
Continue ReadingConsider El Tajin’s famous pyramid of the Niches, built by inheritors of the Olmec culture. Thousands of small stone blocks came together just so, like a Chinese block puzzle, to produce a structure that rises 20 meters in seven tiers. A staircase climbs the eastern face. Curiously, there are 365 square recesses set into the […]
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I collect old books. There’s no more fun for me than to forage through secondhand bookstores, digging up the weird and wonderful, ’50s crime pulp and science fiction, 19th century poetry tomes, books on travel and adventure. In some of those cities where I’ve lived or spent time – Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, Stockholm, Tel Aviv […]
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These days, for some tourists, it seems that physical history, a sense of history, a sublimity of walking in the footsteps of the ancients by the light of nature itself, is not enough – one’s senses, incapable of an exercise of pure imagination, need to be kick-started into an appreciation of one’s surroundings. Flashing laser […]
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Despite years living in Mexico City, I had never been to the archeological zone of Templo Mayor — once the heart of the Aztec empire of Tenochtitlan, now located in the heart of the Historic Centre next to the National Palace and the Cathedral — right off the Zócalo, until very recently. It was something […]
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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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Just outside the unassuming little town of Teuchitlán, Jalisco, 40 kilometers due West of Guadalajara, lies one of the most impressive archeological sites in all of western Mexico. However, the first time I saw it — in 1985 — I was anything but impressed. “Where’s the pyramid?” my friends and I asked a local farmer, […]
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The third-largest deposits of obsidian in the world are found west of the city of Guadalajara and are superseded only by the deposits of Africa’s Rift Valley and the Oregon Plateau. Obsidian forms when lava cools quickly or is degassed in other ways. West Mexico’s obsidian probably began as lava oozing out of cracks in […]
Continue ReadingThe Tajin belongs to the Totonaca culture. It took shape during the late Classic period and reached its peak development during the transition to the Post-Classic, between 800 and 1150 A.D. The word Tajin means “The Sacred city of the Dead and of the Thunder in Storm”. The city was built in the Papanteca mountain […]
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