Let me tell you a little about a place called Cuetzalan.
It’s one of Mexico’s 177 Pueblos Mágicos, a special designation from the Secretary of Tourism for towns with a deep history, rich culture, unique food and craftworks. Cuetzalan happens to be nestled atop a mountain in the Sierra Norte region inside the sprawling state of Puebla.
When Saraí and I arrived, it was December, so we missed the hottest weather of the year. But it was still plenty warm. The climate is such that you’ll see banana trees growing in one house’s yard and coffee trees growing next door.
We had no concrete plans other than to wander up and down the steep cobbled streets enmeshed between the Spanish colonial buildings of the centro. That, and visit a few of the 100 or so waterfalls in the area and feast on the incredible food.
One of the many delicious things to eat there is cecina de res — thinly sliced beef that’s been salted and air-dried. Tlayoyos, as they’re called in Puebla, are a handful of corn flour dough filled with beans, peas or chicharrones, pinched into a ball and then patted flat before they’re pan-fried. Serve topped with salsa.
Eat too much? Try a bit of yolixpa. It’s an herbal liqueur from the area that predates Spanish colonization. While it works as a digestif, it’s traditionally been used to treat all sorts of maladies.
We arrived during Advent, so the town was decorated for Christmas. Lights lining the main street, festooning the gazebo in the central plaza, decorations, parades — the works. The band geek in me was thrilled to hear the high school band’s drum line use the same count-off as my own marching band to start each song.
After price-shopping for a decent tour guide, we paid what felt like a good chunk of pesos for a ride to a waterfall park (among some other stops). The next day we took a microbus from our cabin at an ecotourism lodge to the centro to catch that ride. Traveling on a microbus is great for people-watching — locals jumping on or off at almost every corner, the driver occasionally stopping to hand a message to someone en route, and honking a salute to other bus and cab drivers.
At the park, our guide led us down a seemingly endless set of stairs to the first waterfall. I changed into my suit and jumped in while Saraí took in the natural beauty. As we walked to the next falls, my bare legs caught the attention of some tiny biting gnat (by the end of the tour my legs looked like I had some type of pox).
After I jumped off the rocks into the pool below next fall, then climbing a jungle gym of roots and boulders to see a third, we were faced with the inevitable: climbing back up those endless stairs. It was a slog, and my bug-eaten legs were starting to bleed a little, but we made it.
At the top of the hill we walked through a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. In one house a man was running coffee cherries through a machine to split and discard the bright red skins and pulp around the beans. That machine fed into a trough where water washed off the slime still clinging to the bean. He already had some washed beans spread out under netting on his front porch.
After some further processing, those dried beans would be ready to roast, and the brewed coffee in town was sublime.
But food, architecture, local fruits like guayaba and surrounding natural beauty don’t make a town. Its people do.
Our guide during the last leg of the tour explained how the Mexica and Totonac people have lived in the region for centuries. The children of inter-married families often speak three languages: Nahuatl, Totonac and Spanish (his family spoke Nahuatl and Spanish, if memory serves).
Our guide walked us to the home and workshop of a Totonac woman who demonstrated the culture’s traditional weaving technique honed over countless generations.
Instead of a loom, she had one end of the threads tied up like a hammock, and used a complicated system of threads looped around wooden stave she’d swap with the other, then insert another wooden slat between the threads to change the weaving pattern. The tension mostly came from her holding the working end of the fabric as she wove while seated on a bench.
I could go on and on about this place, but I’ll wrap by saying a trip to Cuetzalan is worth the hours-long bus ride on switchbacked roads through the mountains.