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 Travel & Outdoors | August 2006 
Mexico’s More than La Playa
 Ian Caddell - Straight.com
| | Guadalajara Cathedral holds over 500 people and is usually filled with worshippers for its hourly services. They don’t mind if you walk through and take pictures, but you might want to spend more time in the crypt, where you’ll find the final resting place of bishops and cardinals. |
There probably aren’t too many long-time B.C. residents who want to go to Mexico and can afford to go, but haven’t yet made the trip. The country is certainly accessible from here. It takes about the same amount of time to fly to Mexico’s closest resorts as it does to go to Montreal or Toronto. You have to really want to avoid a place to spend five hours travelling to Toronto when you could spend a few minutes more in the air and end up on a beach.
But what if you don’t like beaches? What if you truly believe that one trip to Jericho brings enough sand and sun block to last a year? Then Mexico is out. Or is it? Puerto Vallarta is not only one of the closer Mexican beach towns to Vancouver, it’s also just a four-hour drive or a 45-minute flight from a place that offers an abundance of colonial history, a town that is has the look of old Europe: Guadalajara.
Guadalajara, the state capital of Jalisco, is the cultural centre of Mexico. It boasts a 150-year-old opera house, an orphanage that was built in the early 1800s and is now a heritage site, a 500-year-old cathedral, a government palace that dates back to the 17th century, and numerous art galleries and public plazas. It also has an abundance of mariachi music, which was born in a town just a few kilometres outside the city limits.
Guadalajara Cathedral holds over 500 people and is usually filled with worshippers for its hourly services. They don’t mind if you walk through and take pictures, but you might want to spend more time in the crypt, where you’ll find the final resting place of bishops and cardinals.
Down the street at the Government Palace, you have to look up to see the highlight, which is murals by Jalisco artist José Clemente Orozco. The grim paintings of World War II are internationally renowned, but they are ferocious enough to scare small children. A more subdued Orozco can be found in the murals at the Hospicio Cabañas, which was built to house a 19th-century orphanage and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was founded in 1805 and started to take in orphans five years later, the same year that Mexico began its fight for independence from Spain.
That struggle and the Mexican Revolution that was fought a century later are memorialized in the surrounding streets and on an abundance of plazas whose offerings range from esoteric food trolleys to bandstands with live music and statues of dead heroes. At the end of the most patriotic plaza — Plaza de la Liberación, which houses a statue of independence leader Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla — is the Teatro Degollado, which was built in 1866. From the outside, the theatre looks somewhat like the Vancouver Art Gallery, with its classic columns. Inside, where it houses most of the city’s major cultural events and, in June and July, the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra, it bears little resemblance to anything North American. Rows and rows of classic theatre boxes climb to a ceiling painted with a scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Local art is everywhere in Guadalajara, even in the hotels. The Hilton Guadalajara is home to several pieces of art by Rodo Padilla, whose statues of strangely dressed men and women riding bicycles appear in art shops around the world. The best of the local art, including Padilla’s, can be found where you would never look for art in North America: the suburbs.
The town of Tlaquepaque is home to over 300 shops and art galleries. For the most part, they’re high-end, with jewellers, glass blowers, painters, ironworkers, and furniture makers exhibiting and selling their wares. Much of it is made in another suburb, Tonalá, where an estimated 6,000 artisans reside. Almost every house in that town has a workshop, and what’s produced can be found throughout the country. Artwork lines the outdoor market, which runs for several blocks. Prices are lower and there is more room for negotiation than in Tlaquepaque. Surprisingly, considering the bargains, fewer tourists wander the streets.
You can visit both suburbs in a day if you time the markets right. Since Tlaquepaque has more restaurants than Tonalá, break for something to eat before heading on to the hard business of bargaining. After walking the Tlaquepaque sidewalks in the heat, you may want to stop off at El Abajeño, an outdoor restaurant with many trees that provide shade and a breeze. A large lunch, accompanied by mariachi music, costs less than $10.
If you still have time after a second round of shopping, you can reach Chapala in 20 minutes, where a walk on the wharf at Lake Chapala lets you enjoy the wind off the water. While you’re there, look for signs of home. Most of the buildings in the town display the Canadian flag, because thousands of expat Canadians live in the town and nearby Ajicic. My best guess is that more than a few of them ended up there after sitting in the Vancouver airport waiting for a plane to Toronto. Perhaps they found out that it took the same amount of time to get to Jalisco, so they decided to head south instead.
ACCESS: Various charter-tour operators fly weekly to Puerto Vallarta between October and March, or you can fly from Vancouver to Mexico City and then connect to Puerto Vallarta.
The Hilton Guadalajara is located downtown at 2933 Avenida de la Rosas, in the complex known as the Guadalajara World Trade Center. (See www.hilton.com/.)
The Tonalá market is open all day Thursday and Sunday. El Abajeño restaurant is in Tlaquepaque at 231 Calle Juárez.
Ian Caddell visited Mexico as a guest of the Mexico Tourism Board. For tourist information see www.visitmexico.com/. |
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