For far too long the history of 19th Century Mayan free rule in the Mexican Yucatán has been largely ignored. But local Maya are working to put it on the map. Through museums, ruins, guided tours and more, they are preserving the legacy of this largest post-colonial indigenous revolution in the Americas, commonly known as […]
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The walk from the Hotel Mesón de Jobito where I’m staying to the Convento de San Francisco is only 15 minutes away but it’s a distance that spans centuries. The route takes me from the hotel built in the 1700s as a residence and then later used as an inn with donkeys, mules, and horses […]
Continue ReadingThousands of dinosaur bones have been found in northern Mexico. Bones literally litter the ground. Here’s a femur; there’s a tibia; vertebrae, ribs, skulls… Dozens of dinosaurs, including the world’s cheapest, have been unearthed in a broad belt across northern Mexico, from Baja California and Sonora in the west, through Chihuahua, and Coahuila to Nuevo […]
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Three sets of twins – two of them unusual tourist delights – await the intrepid traveler who explores the area around the industrial cities of Gómez Palacio and Torreón in northern Mexico. The first, and most obvious, pair of twins is the two cities themselves, which lie either side of the River Nazas. Gómez Palacio […]
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-Valley of Anahuac, New Year’s Eve, 1507. Tenochtitlán, the great island city, capital of the Mexica empire, lies cloaked in darkness. An eerie silence pervades the vast ceremonial center — the Teocalli or Templo Mayor — spreading out over Moctezuma’s splendid palace, with its botanical gardens and well-stocked zoo, across the market places, canals, aqueducts, and within each of […]
Continue ReadingVery few visitors to Guadalajara and, indeed, only a minority of Tapatios (Guadalajara residents), realize that several ancient pyramids, built more than a thousand years ago, still stand in silent pride even as they hear the noise and feel the rumble of the traffic on the city’s ring-road or periférico. The site of Iztépete is […]
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We were lucky: we managed to visit the famous pyramids of Teotihuacan on a rare sunny winter’s day, when Mexico City’s air was clear and, from our bus, you could actually see the snow capped volcano of Popocatepetl some forty miles away. I should explain that it was Christmas Day, a time of year when […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guidebook specifically on Guadalajara and the surrounding area. There are plenty of such books on the Lake Chapala region, serving the many tourists, retirees and ex-pats who find their way down here. But I just don’t recall seeing a specific English text on Mexico’s second largest […]
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“Zacatecas is the town everyone wants to go back to,” a friend said to me when I mentioned that we were going there. If not quite true, at least I know what she meant. Zacatecas was the first town we stayed in the first time we came to Mexico, back in those days when we […]
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The reputation of Mexican criminal investigators is often somewhere below zero, except on this occasion. They don’t even hear about a lot of crimes. They seldom solve cases. Even when they think they have caught a crook, they rarely gain convictions. Judges shake their heads. Maybe the warrant was defective, wrong address, misspelled name. Or […]
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