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 Travel & Outdoors | May 2005 
Villahermosa: More Than A Gateway To The Maya World
 Wendy A. Luft - The Herald Mexico
Flying over the state of Tabasco you see miles and miles of thick green jungle touching the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, crisscrossed by innumerable rivers and lagoons, a unique sight in a country where water is at a premium.
Villahermosa, capital of the state, was founded by the Spanish in the 16th century, on the banks of the Grijalva river. The first time I visited the city, which was during Mexico's oil boom, Villahermosa impressed me as a city that had lost any colonial charm it may have had hardly the "beautiful town" implied in its name. I remember it being hot and tacky, the horizon filled with the orange flames created by burning off the excess natural gas from the wellheads.
Not so today. The oil boom is history and today Villahermosa has been restored to a charming, provincial city.
The downtown area, dominated by the twin towers of the cathedral, is a delight. It is closed to traffic and paved with a pinkish stone, inviting residents and visitors to take a stroll or relax on wrought iron benches under the cool and welcome shade of the trees. The Museum of History is housed in a beautiful tile-covered building, and the former home of Carlos Pellicer Cámara, one of Mexico's leading poets and a native of Tabasco, is also a museum. The Museum of Folk Culture houses a reproduction of a typical home and the furnishings used by the Chontal Indians.
You cannot help but notice that almost everything in Tabasco that is not named for Carlos Pellicer is named for Tomás Garrido Canabal. This is something of an enigma. Garrido was a multifaceted personality who governed Tabasco shortly after the Mexican Revolution, from 1923 to 1926, and again from 1930 to 1934. He gave the vote to women and did an outstanding job in improving the economy, literacy, health, even the dress of the people of his state. But he was also avidly anti-clergy, and his bands of red-shirted workers closed churches (on a positive note, they turned them into schools) and severely limited the activities of priests. The period of inquisition during his administrations was the setting for Graham Green's "The Power and the Glory."
Yet, amazingly, in a country as Catholic as Mexico, little is said about the religious persecution under Garrido Canabal. The park that bears his name is the pride of all Tabascans. Set beside the beautiful Laguna de las Ilusiones (Lagoon of Illusions), this is where the famous La Venta museum is located. Today an oil field, the original La Venta was an Olmec site in Huimanguillo, in the western part of the state. The Olmec culture is considered to be the mother culture of Mesoamerica.
In the 1950s, on the banks of the lagoon, Pellicer Cámara recreated the landscape of the original site including even the animals and birds found in the area and had the colossal monolithic heads, weighing more than 30 tons, the altars, stele, and sculptures of mythical personalities and sacred animals, transplanted from Huimanguillo to the newly created, open-air museum.
Another beautiful park, La Choca ( choca is vernacular for Tabascan peasant women), was built in the shape of the state of Tabasco, with roads, bridges, rivers and topographic elevations, and replicas of the bandstands of each municipality. This is where Tabasco's famous state fair is held every April.
Also within the city is the Research Center for Olmec and Maya Cultures (CICOM) where the Carlos Pellicer Cámara Museum of Archaeology is located. The museum houses the important archaeological collection amassed by the poet while he was its director. Also in the complex are a library, the Museum of Native Dress and Los Tulipanes restaurant, a delightful place to sample the wonderful local cuisine.
And the local cuisine is reason enough to visit the state. Tabasco offers a diverse range of dishes using the fish, chocolate, bananas, coconuts and unusual spices found in the area, including chipilín and chaya . One of the local delicacies is pejelagarto , a decidedly unattractive specimen that resembles a cross between a fish and an alligator, but with a delicious white flesh. Other treats include piguas (a kind of river crayfish), cucaracha del mar (the repulsive name belies its delicate flavor), tepezcuintle (mountain pig), and chonchonitos (a tamale steamed in banana leaves). There's much more to Tabasco than hot sauce. For refreshment, locals swear by pozol , an unsweetened cold drink made from cornmeal and cacao. It is definitely an acquired taste.
Besides being an enticing destination in its own right, Villahermosa is surrounded by places of incredible beauty. The city serves as a gateway to the whole Maya region, and is a convenient take-off point for visiting Palenque, Chiapas and other fascinating ruins.
I went with a group to visit the Cocona Caverns, once a refuge of pirates. Miguel, who said he was 13 but looked about 9, was our self-appointed guide. He led us through well-lit rooms and galleries, carved over millennia into the mountainside. The rooms have been given names such as The Ghosts and the Well of the Blind Fish. (There is actually a pool, fed by an underground river, that's inhabited by blind fish). When we finished the tour, Miguel recited a poem by the state's poet laureate, Carlos Pellicer, that, roughly translated says: “From Tabasco's waters I come, And to Tabasco's waters I go, My heritage was born in beautiful waters, and that's why I am here, happy with all that is mine,” "As I will be happy with all my tips," he added, with a very serious face.
In the town of Tapijulapa we boarded a skiff for a delightful ride on the emerald waters of the Oxolaotan river, stopping in Villa Luz to trek through the thick tropical forest for a look at the home of Tomás Garrido Canabal, enjoyed a delightful waterfall and then a visit to some sulfur springs.
Another day we visited Comalcalco, the westernmost Maya site, which is located about 50 miles northwest of Villahermosa. Kilnfired bricks were used for construction, logical in an area lacking in building stone. There are still traces of the stucco made with ground oyster shells mixed with sap that once covered all the buildings. Igloo-shaped clay tombs have been found, with skeletons in fetal positions surrounded by their possessions. A large skull embedded in the side of Temple I is made of volcanic stone proof that it was brought from afar.
From the top of the pyramid, as far as your eye can see, the jungle is thick with pink blossomed maculi trees, bananas, mangoes, ceibas, palms and cacao. Next on our agenda was a tour of Hacienda de la Luz, a cacao plantation, where we learned everything there is to know about growing and making chocolate. (A word of advice: Tabasco chocolate makes delicious hot cocoa; the cacao wine, however, like pozol, is definitely an acquired taste.)
Next on our itinerary was Palenque, the most majestic of the Maya archaeological zones, Located in a clearing of jungle in the state of Chiapas, Palenque is about 112 kilometers from Villahermosa. It is most famous for the Temple of Inscriptions, which contains a royal tomb, with the remains of a body, thought to be a Maya king, tightly sealed in an elaborately carved stone coffin. Tombs are rarely found in Mexico's pyramids, but several have been uncovered fairly recently at Palenque.
All animal lovers will want to visit an ecological park almost next door to the airport. Yumka, which in the Chontal language means "the gnome that watches over the jungle," is designed to preserve a small portion of Tabasco's three eco-systems jungle, savanna and swamp and give people today and idea of what the region was like in days gone by, when Tabasco was 90 percent jungle.
Wendy Luft is a freelance writer and translator, living in Mexico City. Her e-mail is: wendyluft@mac.com |
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