On the day after Christmas in 2015, my husband, Brad, and I embarked on a road trip in Mexico. Our plan was to visit three of Mexico’s pueblos mágicos: Taxco, Malinalco, and Valle de Bravo.
It didn’t begin as a road trip. It began as a bus trip to Taxco, a picturesque town in the mountains of Guerrero that I had wanted to visit for ages. But after our two nights in Taxco, we rented a car and spent the rest of the week driving on our own. We were a little worried about driving in Mexico. We’d heard (and read) horror stories about the problems American drivers can run into on Mexico’s highways. But we found the toll roads in Central Mexico to be well maintained and easy to drive on, and we ran into no trouble at all.
Taxco is famous for its silver crafts. Silver was mined in the Taxco area in pre-Columbian times, but when Cortes became aware of the region’s silver lodes, serious mining operations began, and before too long, Taxco’s silver veins had been mined to depletion. In 1929, William Spratling, an American architect (and friend of Diego Rivera), moved to Taxco and began an effort to revive the town’s tradition of silver craftsmanship. His designs, based on indigenous motifs, gained fame and brought tourists to Taxco. The town became a magnet for American artists and writers in the 30’s and 40’s, when Paris was occupied by the Nazis. All the Mexican muralists spent time here, as did Patricia Highsmith, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Saul Bellow. The rumor is that they spent more time drinking than writing or painting.
I had booked us two nights in Hotel Los Arcos, a charming pension just a block away from Taxco’s central plaza. On our first night, we had dinner at Terraza 360, a restaurant with stunning panoramic views of the town. Afterward, we strolled about in the quaint city center, which was decked out for Christmas with thousands of poinsettia bushes forming a design of some sort (one that I didn’t recognize) on the zócalo. The next day, we wandered around the town, visiting the cathedral and the many shops selling silver jewelry. That night, we sipped mezcal at Mezcalería Xoco, while chatting with the friendly owner, and then took the teleferico (a gondola) up a mountain to have dinner and listen to mariachi music at the Hotel Montetaxco.
The morning of our departure, we sought out a popular breakfast restaurant (S caffecito) and then planned to go to the Spratling museum, only to find that the restaurant was run by Spratling’s adopted niece and is located in Spratling’s house. While we waited for our breakfast to be prepared, the owner, Violante Ulrich, gave us a tour of the house and showed us few pieces by Spratling himself, along with her own silver designs. She told us that Spratling was gay (something confirmed by many of the books that have been written about Spratling) and that her father had been one of his best friends. After Spratling’s death, her father had come into possession of the house, and he (and his daughters after him) were determined to keep Spratling’s silver craftsmanship going. The pieces Violante showed us were expensive, but she eventually coaxed Brad into buying a couple of the smaller, more affordable ones.
After our breakfast at S caffecito, we toured the Spratling Museum and then headed back to our hotel, where we had arranged for a driver to take us to Toluca to pick up a rental car. Toluca is a big city, and getting out of it proved to be the most stressful part of our road trip. But before long we found ourselves in the beautiful countryside around Malinalco, where we were planning to spend the next two nights. We had a reservation in Hotel Paradiso, which looked as if it had been designed by Gaudí. I think we were the hotel’s only guests the nights we were there.
Malinalco proved to be the least touristy of the places we visited on this road trip. We were there mid-week, and we were told that the town is a popular place for weekend getaways from Mexico City. Our first night there, we walked around town for about an hour before discovering an open restaurant. El Sarraceno was run by a French immigrant, and the food and wine were excellent. Unfortunately, the restaurant has since closed, but we liked it so much that we ate there two nights in a row.
Malinalco is named after Malinalxochitl, a goddess who lived among the Mexica people as a sorceress. According to legend, she tormented the people, and they prayed to her brother, Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica god of war. He advised them to abandon her, and they did. She, along with a handful of her followers, settled in Malinalco and intermarried with the people there. To this day, the people of Malinalco are associated with sorcery, and the town has a kind of new age vibe.
The main tourist draw in Malinalco is the archeological site Cuauhcalli. Carved into a hillside overlooking the town, it was a place where elite Aztec warriors went to participate in some rather grizzly initiation rituals. At the bottom of the hill is a museum that explains the site, run by the UNAM.
Malinalco is a pleasant little town with cobblestone streets, adobe houses, and many shops selling clothing and local crafts. Brad was delighted to be able to buy a michelada from a street vendor and walk around town drinking it.
After two nights there, we drove to Valle de Bravo for the weekend—a weekend that just happened to coincide with New Year holiday. If Malinalco was relatively deserted, the opposite was true of Valle de Bravo. It was packed, and just getting into town involved sitting in slow moving traffic for over an hour.
I first learned of Valle de Bravo from watching Mexican telenovelas. One novela I watched (I can’t remember which) involved a storyline in which the protagonists hid from the villains in Valle de Bravo. Located at the side of Lake Avándaro, Valle de Bravo is especially popular with Mexico City’s more affluent residents, many of whom have vacation houses here. It’s also popular with paragliders, and it’s located near Piedra Herrada, one of Mexico’s sanctuaries for Monarch butterflies.
We rented a beautiful Airbnb apartment with gorgeous views of the lake. Every morning, a lovely woman named Pricila came to the apartment and made us breakfast and served it to us in the garden. We found Valle de Bravo to be a charming town to wander around in, and we were happy that we could leave our rental car at the apartment and see the town on foot. On the day that we decided to drive to Piedra Herrada, it took us so long to get out of Valle de Bravo’s traffic that we arrived at Piedra Herrada too late to enter the park. We extended our stay in Valle de Bravo by one day so that we could go back–and also because, aside from the traffic, we were enjoying our stay in the town.
When we returned to Piedra Herrada the next day, we paid to ride horses to the top of the mountain, where the butterflies hang out. It was a steep climb, and we felt rather sorry for the horses—and almost as sorry for the young Mexican men whose job it was to hike up the mountain beside the horses, threatening them and occasionally swatting them on their rumps to get them to move faster. When we got to the top of the mountain, we thought that the poor horses had gone to all of that effort for nothing, for the butterflies were all asleep. It was a beautifully sunny day in Valle de Bravo, but at the top of Piedra Herrada, it was cloudy and gray—and in such conditions, the butterflies sleep. They only fly when the sun is shining. We were told that millions of butterflies fluttering about is quite a sight to behold—but it appeared that it was a sight we weren’t going to get to enjoy. We decided to hike back down the mountain, and after we had gone a little way, we came upon a patch of blue sky, and we were able to see a few of the butterflies in action. (For a video of these butterflies on a sunny day at Piedra Herrada, check out this blog article.)
On our way down the mountain, we struck up a conversation with a paraglider named Howie, who—small world—turned out to know a paragliding friend of ours in San Francisco named Eric. We hiked down the mountain with him, and then we gave him a ride back to Valle de Bravo.
We were happy to spend an extra night in Valle de Bravo. That night, while browsing the many crafts stores in Valle de Bravo, we happened upon La Chiquita Tlayuderia, a cute little restaurant that served tlayudas, a Oaxacan dish that is sometimes referred to as “Mexican Pizza.” Large, round tortillas are topped with beans, sauces, cheese, etc. We enjoyed a delicious meal there, accompanied by cervezas artesanales (craft beers).
The next day we were in a rush to return our rental car and then get a taxi to the airport for a flight back to San Francisco. For me, it was the end of a year-long sabbatical, four months of which I had spent in Mexico. It was a lovely way to wrap up my sabbatical. It was a road trip that I would gladly repeat—though if I do, I will make sure to spend more time in each of these wonderful places.