San Cristobal de Las Casas: A Magical City in the Mountains of Mexico
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS
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We entered the maze of narrow, mostly one-way streets, with rain falling steadily, and no clue where we were, or where we were going. I’d reserved us a hotel room through Expedia.Mx, a place called the Hotel Hacienda Don Juan. It sounded terrific on the website, but it was NOT in the center of town with the rest of the hotels, so finding it proved quite a challenge. We programmed the address into Mike’s phone and started following the turn-by-turn instructions. If we’d used the GPS from the beginning, it would have been easy, but starting where we did, Google had us driving down narrow alleys and over tiny one-way bridges intended for horse carts and pedestrians. I assumed the GPS had malfunctioned, because there was no way in the world the route we’d just followed was going to lead us anywhere but lost. We popped out of another alley and onto a main street, and, much to my surprise, there it was!
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The grounds of the hotel were surrounded by a wall, so all you could see from the street was a long cobblestone drive through a tunnel of trees, leading back to a lushly landscaped courtyard. Still not quite believing that this was really the right spot, we drove in, and checked in, to what was probably the coolest hotel of our whole trip.
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We didn’t have a lot of time in San Cristobal de las Casas. We arrived in late afternoon, and we were going to have to leave first thing the next morning. Our whole visit was compressed into a single quite wonderful evening, wandering the cobblestone streets between storefronts of buildings that were hundreds of years old. Many were restored and newly painted, mostly earth tones, rather than the muted pastels we’d so admired in Campeche. The local folk were mostly indigenous, with roots in this region going back countless generations, but it’s important to note that most of the people we saw on the street that night didn’t appear to be locals. They were visitors, just like us, most of them Chilangos, a disparaging term for people from the D.F. (Mexico City). There were college kids in jeans and jackets, on holiday from their studies, as well as backpacker types from Europe and Asia, all checking out the scene. Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared San Cristobal de las Casas to be “Lo mas Magico de los Pueblos Magicos!” (“The most Magical of the Magical Towns!”) That’s quite a distinctive honor, when you consider the fact that there are no less than 177 cities and towns in Mexico that have earned the designation of Pueblo Magico, an honor bestowed by the Mexican Government, for the purpose of preserving cultural heritage–and promoting tourism.
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An evening spent in one of Mexico’s Colonial Cities always seems to include some sort of celebration in the main plaza. In San Cristobal de las Casas, they put on a concert, featuring a local orchestra playing both classical and contemporary instrumentals. The conductor was–let’s just say he was enthusiastic, and his musicians, of varying skill levels, did their best to keep up with him. The night was crisp and cool, the crowd respectful, applauding in all the right places. Colored spotlights lit the stage, and photo-luminescent plastic necklaces lit the faces in the audience with a ghostly blue glow.
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Like every Spanish Colonial City in Mexico, San Cristobal de las Casas has a centuries-old cathedral that fronts on the main plaza, in this case, the Cathedral of San Cristobal Martir. Construction started in 1528, making it one of the oldest churches in Mexico. There’s a simple elegance to the building’s facade, painted pale yellow (and in need of a fresh coat)!
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Mike was constantly shooting video with his GoPro camera, so I made a project out of reviewing those clips and capturing screen shots of anything interesting. The resulting images are a little blurry, and often at strange angles, but they’re fun to see. Here are a few from our evening in San Cristobal de las Casas:
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San Cristobal de las Casas in 1971
Original Photographs by Carl Duisberg
My good friend Carl Duisberg has been a world traveler almost as long as I’ve known him, and I’ve known him since we were both kids in school. I recently helped Carl resurrect two dozen rolls of black and white film from some of his early travels, negatives that had been packed away for half a century and essentially forgotten. No prints were made when the film was processed, all those years ago, so when I scanned and edited the images, I brought wonderful photos to life that had never been seen before.
One of those rolls of film was shot in San Cristobal de las Casas, more than fifty years ago, and Carl has graciously agreed to share them here. Viewing these old photos, it’s apparent how much has changed in what was, at that time, a primarily indigenous community. In 1971, the modern world has barely intruded on this charming Colonial City in the mountains of Chiapas.
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All in all, we sincerely enjoyed our brief visit to San Cristobal de las Casas. During my years in South America (back in the early 1970’s) I spent quite a lot of time in cities and towns surrounded by tropical mountains much like these, with cool climate, predominantly Indian populations, and Spanish Colonial buildings. Walking those streets felt like deja vu, even though I knew perfectly well I’d never been there before. It was the atmosphere, and the chilly evening, and the scenery, all of it together stirring fond memories dating back many decades.
Tomorrow, we’d push it a bit, as far as Oaxaca, and the next day to Puebla, or possibly Queretaro. From there, it was a short drive to San Miguel de Allende for a three day fiesta focused on the Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. That was going to be the icing on the cake of our Mexican Road Trip. But first we had to get there, and it’s a long danged drive from San Cristobal de las Casas to San Miguel de Allende!
Next up: Day 21: San Cristobal to Tuxtla Guttierez
San Cristobal de las Casas to Tuxtla Guttierez
Day 21! We’d been on the road in Mexico for three very full weeks, and for most of that time, we had no fixed itinerary, and no set schedule. We never planned more than a day or two ahead, so the route that we were following evolved as we drove along. I prefer that style of travel, personally, because it affords maximum flexibility, but now that we were closing in on the last phase of our road trip, all that flexibility went right out the window. We wanted to experience Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebration, and we’d concluded that the best place for us to do that would be in San Miguel de Allende, the charming Pueblo Magico and UNESCO World Heritage site, five hours north of Mexico City. We’d passed through there far too briefly on our drive south, and we’d vowed to return for a proper visit on our way back north. The three day fiesta was going to be our last hurrah before our final push back to the border, the cherry on the top of our Mexican Road Trip, and timing was suddenly critical. It was going to take us two full days of driving, just to get there in time for the start of the holiday. We’d spend three days and nights in San Miguel, and that would leave us exactly two days for the drive to the border and on to Austin, where we’d be arriving just in time for Mike to catch his flight back home. It was all perfectly doable, and perfectly timed, but there was ZERO room for any deviation or delay.
San Miguel de Allende is one of the most popular destinations in Mexico during the Day of the Dead holiday; we’d been warned about that, so we’d used Expedia.Mx to find a hotel with availability (the Hotel San Ramon), and we’d made our reservations weeks in advance. Knowing that we had our lodging squared away for the necessary dates was a good feeling, but this two-day drive we were facing wasn’t going to be like crossing Kansas on the Interstate. There were at least a bazillion things that could go wrong and prevent us from getting to San Miguel on schedule. We had just two days to cover most of the length of the country, much of that considerable distance over dangerously beautiful mountain roads…
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San Cristobal de las Casas to San Miguel de Allende
Today, we’d be driving as far as the city of Oaxaca, 380 miles of curves, switchbacks, and rolling hills that would require at least ten hours of our full attention, crossing the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, traversing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and entering the rugged, agave-studded landscape of the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca. If you’d like to know what that was like, read on!
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CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE on MX 190
San Cristobal de las Casas is an old city that was laid out long before the advent of automobiles, so most of the roads are narrow one-way streets, and those few that are not tend to be jam-packed with more traffic than they can handle. In order to get out of town, we had to join that slow-and-go herd, dodging taxis, trucks, and pedestrians through the business district, until we finally spied a sign pointing toward the Toll Road to Tuxtla Guttierez.
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Scenes along the road leaving San Cristobal de las Casas
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Scenes along MX 190 from San Cristobal de las Casas to Tuxtla Guttierez
This portion of MX 190 is designated MX 190 D, because it is a “Cuota,” a toll road. What that means, in practical terms, is that there’s funding available for proper maintenance. Sometimes the cuotas are limited access divided highways, much like the modern expressways in the U.S. and Europe. More commonly, they are simply in better shape than the “libre,” (free) alternatives, with fewer potholes and topes (speed bumps), as well as less livestock, and fewer pedestrians, because they bypass the small towns.
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Construction zone: a portion of the highway is being resurfaced, using equipment and techniques that are all too familiar to drivers from the United States.
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There are few (if any) passing lanes on these mountain roads, so long lines of vehicles tend to stack up behind slow trucks and buses. An entitled idiot in a Suzuki SUV decided he just HAD to leapfrog his way to the front of the pack, so he whipped around me on the left, then cut back into my lane, forcing me to brake and veer onto the shoulder.
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The horn on my Jeep is linked to my car alarm, with dual trumpets and a very loud siren. I gave him an extended blast, followed by two or three more. That didn’t change anything–but it made me feel better, and it most definitely got his attention!
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Nobody likes being cut off; we stayed mad until the pendejo finally jumped every car in the line ahead of us and disappeared!
The area in between San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Guttierez is still the Chiapas Highlands, a mountainous plateau that forms the greater portion of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. Tuxtla, with a population well in excess of half a million, is the capital of the State of Chiapas and the largest city in the region. The closer we got to it, the more level the terrain; since leaving San Cristobal, we’d dropped more than a mile in altitude, into a much warmer climate.
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TUXTLA GUTTIEREZ
Tuxtla (pronounced tooks-tlah) Guttierez is not much of a town for tourists. There are no Mayan ruins, no beaches, no picturesque colonial architecture. It’s a contemporary era Mexican city with nothing special to set it apart. There’s no significant local industry, so the largest employer is the Chiapas state government. The city ‘s main claim to fame is as a transportation center, the hub where all the regional highways and bus lines come together, and the location of the largest regional airport.
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Tuxtla Guttierez
For me and Michael, it was nothing but an unwelcome delay. We had no plans to stop for anything other than fuel; since there was no bypass route, we had to drive through the middle of town, and the traffic was tied in knots.
At one point we were stopped dead for at least ten minutes, nobody moving in any direction due to an accident in an intersection up ahead of us. Several of the sidewalk vendors took advantage of the situation to wander among the stalled vehicles, hawking snacks. I’d just recently recovered from a bout with the Turistas, so I wasn’t inclined to risk food from a questionable source, but Mike was hungry, so he called this guy over. Unfortunately, what he was selling wasn’t food. It was a unique local handicraft, a banana leaf, cleverly folded and trimmed to look like an oversized grasshopper.
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Mike decided it would make a great gift for his granddaughter, so he bought one. I can’t honestly remember if he got it home in one piece, but it was definitely an interesting souvenir!
Next up: Crossing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and on to Oaxaca
Everything was fairly calm, as far as police and military action, but we did see an occasional reminder of tension behind the scenes:
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A machine gun set up behind sandbags on the road out of town
After leaving Tuxtla Guttierez, we were back in the mountains once again.
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This was the point when we crossed the narrowest section of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and entered the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca.
Prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the shortest overland route between the oceans was right here; mule trains, and, in later years, a standard gauge railroad ferried cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa. They still transport some cargo along that route, which is billed as a faster, less costly alternative to the Panama Canal, but the most important thing moving along that corridor today is the steady breeze, created by the temperature differential between the two oceans. There is a gap between the Cordilleras of the Sierra Madre, the Chivela Pass, which concentrates and accelerates the flow of air between massive walls of rock, creating a source of power with enormous potential. The level ground on either side of the highway is perfect for wind turbines, so in 2009, the Oaxaca Wind Power Complex was built. There are hundreds of turbines, lined up in rows for more than 30 km, producing hundreds of megawatts of clean energy, offsetting vast amounts of CO2 and other pollutants.
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The Oaxaca Wind Power Complex is made up of hundreds of turbines installed alongside MX 190, beginning at about Kilometer 217 (as measured from Tuxtla Guttierez) and running west from there, all the way to Kilometer 250.
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TRAVELER’S ADVISORY (effective September, 2024):
The U.S. Department of State has issued a Level 4 (Do Not Travel) advisory for this region. The restrictions are mandatory for U.S. government employees, and strongly advised for all U.S. travelers, due to the high prevalence of violent crime, and recent increases in activity by the Mexican cartels.
• Isthmus region: U.S. government employees may not travel to the area of Oaxaca bounded by Federal Highway 185D to the west, Federal Highway 190 to the north, and the Oaxaca-Chiapas border to the east. This includes the cities of Juchitan de Zaragoza, Salina Cruz, and San Blas Atempa.
•
Please note that Highway 190 through the Isthmus region is considered the northern edge of the restricted area, but is not included in the restrictions. It’s still considered the safest route between Tuxtla Guttierez and Oaxaca, but if you’re driving this way, it’s important that you stay on Highway 190 until you’re past Tehuantepec. Don’t deviate toward the coast, and don’t stop along the way unless it’s absolutely necessary!
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Scenes along MX 190, West of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
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The further we travelled into the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, the more desert-like the terrain, complete with tall cactus such as this fine specimen.
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They don’t need flat land for growing agave. Any bare patch of dirt will do.
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A small mescal factory with a pulping mill powered by a cow in harness, walking in circles
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Scenes along the Road to Oaxaca
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Next up: Oaxaca!
the photos are very cool.
Rick,
Great report--as always--and the photos are very cool.
Quote:
when a bottle of Mescal is passed around at a party, whoever ends up with the last swig is honor bound to eat the worm.
I am not sure why this is, but for some peculiar reason this task has fallen on my plate several times over the years! Statistically, way, way beyond reasonable happenstance in my view!
