Cultivating curiosity and wellbeing in Mexico
A personal view of Mexico, its joys, its beauties, its contradictions, and its follies.
Taxco de Alarcón is located in the hills of Central Mexico. It is one of Mexico’s Pueblos Mágicos, or magical villages. It is, in fact, the only Magical Village within the Mexican state of Guerrero, wherein lie the Pacific coast beach destinations of Acapulco and Ixtapa Zihuatanejo. Taxco is one Continue Reading →
Waterfalls of the Huasteca Potosina The Huasteca, part of which lies along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental and runs down to the Gulf Coast along the basin of the Rio Panuco (Panuco River) in Mexico, is incredibly rich in water resources, and the landscape and vegetation testify Continue Reading →
Mexico’s Magical Villages The Mexican Ministry of Tourism (SECTUR) collaborates with a number of state and municipal governmental entities in its Magical Villages program that seeks to recognize and make known to national and international tourists the infinitely beautiful, interesting, historical, natural, and magical towns and landscapes that give Mexico Continue Reading →
We discovered Taninul Hotel and spa in the Huasteca Potosina through the recommendations of family and friends who’d visited this special, lush, and splendid area of Mexico in search of adventure and the Englishman’s castle–the enchanted gardens of Edward James at Las Pozas, Xilitla. The hotel was built in a Continue Reading →
Las Pozas, Xilitla: The Enchanted Gardens of Edward James At a place known as Las Pozas, only a few kilometers outside of the town of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, in the heart of Mexico’s La Huasteca region, Englishman Edward James conceptualized and built an astounding showcase of surrealistic structures in Continue Reading →
Today I want to share a wonderful find: an encyclopedia of Guerrero, Mexico (Enciclopedia Guerrerense) and its appendix, Guerrerismos, or idiomatic terms and phrases of Guerrero state. The online encyclopedia of Guerrero is in Spanish but does have links to translations via the Google translation service. It is indexed in Continue Reading →
The UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Mexico Of all the countries in the Americas, Mexico can boast of having within its boundaries the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage sites, counting both its cultural and natural sites. Mexico, as of May 25, 2014, has had thirty-two sites inscribed into the World Continue Reading →
Reading and summarizing the 1824 journal of travels made by a detachment of men sent by the Real del Monte Mining Company from the gulf coast of Mexico into the highlands, I was reminded of the beauties of the countryside in one of Mexico’s unspoiled regions, the Huasteca. The mining Continue Reading →
This is a continuation of a previous post about a journey from New York to the Mexican mining town of Real del Monte (Mineral del Monte) undertaken by a detachment sent by the Real del Monte Mining Company in 1824. The men had landed in Tampico and had come through Continue Reading →
Nahuatl, called the Aztec language or Mexicano at times, is one of the most wide-spread of the indigenous languages of Mexico. It is the language of the Nahuas of the empire of the Mexicas that dominated much of Mexico and Central America before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and Continue Reading →
How a mining company expedition in the early 1820s spawned and fueled Mexico’s passion for the sport of football soccer. A synopsis and excerpts from III. Journal descriptive of the Route from New York to Real del Monte by way of Tampico by one of the first detachment sent by the Real Continue Reading →
A wonderful vignette full of the sounds and aromas of Mexico, the very Mexican sensations that happily assault us every morning as we start our days, written by a dear friend of mine who has allowed me to publish it here. The Sounds of My Neighborhood English version of “Asi Continue Reading →
Waking with the dawn and watching the sun invade the horizon from a perch on a clifftop at the highest point of the Chihuahua Pacific railroad (El Chepe) in the Copper Canyons of Mexico was an unforgettable experience. The night before (see the previous post), we had watched the sun Continue Reading →
Years ago, we made a three-day trip into the Copper Canyon (Barrancas del Cobre) on the Chihuahua to Pacific railway in northern Mexico. Watching a recent video (below) on YouTube brought back recollections of the trip and made me want to experience again the majesty of those canyons in northern Continue Reading →
Although Mexico’s markets have traditionally offered locally grown produce and regionally made handicrafts, the globalization of the past decade or two has changed purchasing trends immensely. Now it’s just as easy–and sometimes easier–to find produce grown in South America and artifacts mass-produced in China than to find local, Mexican goods Continue Reading →
We are book scroungers. Books of every age and provenance fill up bookshelves, trunks, and closets, and a few uncommon curiosities have made their ways into our ever-growing libraries over the course of the past three or four decades. One of these is a small-format, ragged, and weathered booklet–almost more Continue Reading →