Mexico City + Oaxaca: pyramids, mezcal and the best food in the Americas
One of the world's great museums, pyramids an hour from the capital — and a mountain city people travel to for food, crafts and the Day of the Dead.
Why Oaxaca rather than a beach
Most people take Cancun out of Mexico, which is an understandable choice. But the country is more interesting where there is no sea: Oaxaca is the centre of the Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, the capital of Mexican cooking and mezcal, a city with a colonial core where people arrive from the villages in traditional dress. Ninety minutes of flying from the capital, and an entirely different Mexico.
Mexico City: five days
The National Museum of Anthropology is compulsory and needs half a day at least: the Aztec calendar stone, the Olmec heads, halls for every culture. The Zocalo with the cathedral and the Templo Mayor excavated in the very centre. Coyoacan with Frida Kahlo's blue house. Xochimilco with its canals and trajinera boats. Teotihuacan an hour away — the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, built long before the Aztecs, who themselves considered them an inheritance from the gods.
Oaxaca: five days
The city is small and very pleasant: Santo Domingo with its gilded interior, the Benito Juarez and 20 de Noviembre markets where people eat in the aisles. Monte Alban, the Zapotec capital on a levelled mountaintop, with a plaza and an observatory. Hierve el Agua, petrified «waterfalls» of mineral deposits with pools at the edge of a cliff. Craft villages: Teotitlan for weaving, San Bartolo for black pottery, and the palenques where mezcal is made the old way.
About the food, separately
Oaxaca is called the country's culinary capital for good reason: seven kinds of mole, thick sauces of dozens of ingredients including chocolate; tlayuda, an enormous crisp flatbread; chapulines, grasshoppers, which really are eaten; fresh quesillo cheese. Mezcal here is sipped rather than downed, and the difference between varieties is enormous.
When to go
October–April is the dry season. Late October and early November bring the Day of the Dead, and Oaxaca is considered the best place in the country to see it: cemeteries in candlelight, processions, altars. But everything is booked months ahead then. From June to September it rains, usually in the afternoon.
Teotihuacan
A city built before the Aztecs and abandoned a thousand years before the Spanish; who built it is not known for certain. The Avenue of the Dead runs more than two kilometres with the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon at its ends. Climbing the pyramids is now largely forbidden for conservation, but the scale reads from below. Go for opening: by midday the sun is hard and there is no shade at all. Balloons fly over the complex at dawn, which is a separate morning programme.
Mezcal and how to drink it
Mezcal is made from agave in Oaxaca; tequila is a particular case of mezcal, from blue agave in another state. The difference in taste is smoke: the heart of the agave is roasted in an earth pit over coals. It is drunk in small sips with orange and worm salt (sal de gusano). In the palenques — small workshops around the city — they show the whole process from roasting to distillation in clay stills. Varieties differ by agave: espadin is the common one, tobala and madrecuishe are rarer and dearer.
Practical matters
Russian citizens need an electronic authorisation to enter Mexico, applied for online in advance — check the current requirements before buying tickets. Mexico City lies at 2,200 metres and the first day can feel heavy. Drink bottled water only. Street food can and should be eaten — the same guide applies, a queue of locals.
Moscow → Mexico City → Oaxaca
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