5 days in Oaxaca: What to know before you go
Textiles, tamales, tlayudas and running into people you know.
Every trip starts with a trip to the library.
In the months before I go somewhere, I check out books about that place, including a travel guide. Fiction, non-fiction, picture books. These books inform the upcoming adventure in one way or another, but they also fuel the sense of anticipatory joy that is one of my favorite aspects of traveling.
Over the holidays, I picked up Oliver Sacks’ “Oaxaca Journal,” a short little travelog about a weeklong journey to Oaxaca to study the region’s remarkable biodiversity of ferns, and “When Montezuma Met Cortés,” which covers the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519, an event that devastated the indigenous population and changed world history.
Getting excited about the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of a place is one thing, but peeling back the layers of social and geopolitical history is another, and as I learned on this recent trip to Oaxaca, there are some things you can’t learn until you get there.
If you have the chance to spend five days there, here’s how I would spend them and what you should know before you go:
The first stop in Oaxaca should be the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, which is the largest and most comprehensive museum in the city. Housed in a former convent, the museum explains the history of this region and includes a newer exhibit about a tomb filled with archeological treasures at the nearby historic site, Monte Alban.
If you’re not a check-out-a-book-from-the-library traveler (or perhaps, especially so if you are), this museum is the best place to learn about what you’ll see and experience during the rest of your time in the region.
The Museo Textil de Oaxaca and the Museo de Arte Prehispánico de México Rufino Tamayo were small, but nice to check out. There's a postage stamp museum and a photography museum and a contemporary art museum and a museum dedicated to the painters of Oaxaca, so leave some time in your schedule to browse some of these while you’re there. (Many of them do not charge admission, and some only take cash.)
One of the unmissable experiences in Oaxaca is the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca, an oasis of native plants and cacti, some of which are more than a hundred years old. This site, located next to the Museo de las Culturas, is only open to visitors who take a tour, and the tours can be hard to track down. Most days, they have an English tour at 11 a.m. and a Spanish tour at 10 a.m., but they were short-staffed when we were there, so there were no English tours most of the days. We learned that the English tours fill up quickly, so you have to get there about an hour early to ensure a spot. We found the best strategy was to stop by around 9:30 a.m. and chat with someone at the gate about the options that day.
I haven’t always been a “take a tour” kind of traveler, but I enjoyed having a guide at the ethnobotanic garden, and I’m really glad we had a tour guide for the sprawling Central de Abastos market, one of the largest markets in Mexico, through Etnofood, which offers coffee and cooking classes, mezcal pairings, mixology, hot chocolate tastings, and even woodcarving workshops. (Another place to learn about wood engraving is 20-20 Arte Contemporáneo, which offers three-hour woodblock printing classes in both English and Spanish.)
Our guide led us on a three-hour tour through the winding stalls of the market, including the famous Pasillo de Humo, or Smoke Alley, where long strands of tripe, chorizo, and carne slowly smoke over charcoal. We ate tlayudas, the open-faced tortillas found everywhere in Oaxaca, quesadillas, and an egg fried in a leaf of hoja santa. We tried pulque, tepache, and tejate, a regional drink I’d never seen anywhere else in Mexico. This market tour was one of the highlights of the trip, but these tours fill up, so plan ahead if you want to try to go on one.
Five days in Oaxaca is enough time for at least one out-of-town adventure, possibly two. There are essentially three day trips that people typically take: Hierve El Agua, a natural area with mineral springs and a petrified waterfall; the archeological site of Monte Albán; and to the small crafting villages outside Oaxaca, where you can see how people make the textiles, ceramics, and mezcal you’ll see everywhere in the region.
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