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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The inhabitants of the village of Oconahua, Jalisco, have a secret. A thousand years ago, their pueblito, located 75 kilometers west of Guadalajara, was a grand city covering 500-600 hectares, and their ancestors ruled all of western Mexico from a magnificent edifice covering 15.6 square kilometers and today known as El Palacio de Ocomo. Archeologist […]
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An old railway station at the western end of the train tracks in Jalisco, Mexico, bears witness to unspeakable cruelties perpetrated upon thousands of Yaqui Indians in the early 1900s. According to the Jalisco Secretariat of Culture’s Guachimontones Guide Book, Yaquis were sold as slaves at the station “for 25 centavos a head” and “around the station were located […]
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In 1916, the Amparo Mining Company had the most successful silver mines in Jalisco and was making money hand over fist. Although it was located pretty much in the middle of nowhere, 65 kilometers due west of Guadalajara near the town of Etzatlan, rumors abound that a bustling community of some 6,000 souls once lived […]
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Driving up the long rise into Mineral de Pozos, framed by the gray-brown humpbacked mountains once laced with veins of silver and gold, the visitor first sees the stone walls of the cemetery, the panteón, before he enters the town. It seems like a fitting introduction to a city that nearly died itself, sinking from a population […]
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You might say that it all began on an ordinary day in New York – the treasure hunt, that is. My 23 year old daughter Elise was just back from Spain where she had been teaching English to grade school students. One quiet evening, as we sat together at home, I showed her four large […]
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City parks were not an important part of my life when I was a child. I was raised in the country on a farm which, for all practical purposes, was a park. Growing older, though, I learned to appreciate the importance of city parks, especially in large urban areas. In fact, I wound up residing […]
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All the world has been told that tequila, the drink was born in Tequila — the town located 45 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara — but is this really a fact? Curiously, the famed Tequila Express train has, for years, been carrying tourists straight to a small town called Amatitán, and not to Tequila at all. […]
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An icon in Mexico City, the Revolution Monument or Monumento a la Revolución is also known as the Arch of the Revolution. It is located on Plaza de la Republica between downtown Reforma and Insurgentes, and has long been a premier tourist attraction, one of the capital’s architectural must-sees. Only in recent times, however, has the Monument […]
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Dale Hoyt Palfrey The most important center of the Mexican highlands after the fall of Teotihuacan was Cholula, near the twin volcanic peaks Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl and the city of Puebla. The Great Pyramid there, dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, is the largest single structure in the New World. Towering 181 feet high and covering an area […]
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