Mexico, for most international travellers, begins and ends on a Caribbean coastline. A flight into Cancún. A transfer south to Tulum or one of the quieter strips along the Riviera Maya. A week of beach, cenote, and the kind of slightly self-conscious boho-luxe hospitality that the stretch has become genuinely famous for. A tour of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá or Cobá. A flight home. A very good holiday — warm, photogenic, well-organised, and almost entirely disconnected from the country it happens to be sitting inside.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. It is simply not Mexico.
The Mexico that Mexicans themselves consider the country's actual heart — the Mexico that the food, the writing, the cinema, and the visual art have all been arguing about and drawing from for a hundred years — sits roughly six hundred kilometres south of the Yucatán resort coast, in a valley surrounded by three mountain ranges, at an altitude of one and a half thousand metres, under a light that is specifically its own. This is Oaxaca. Both the city, at the valley's centre, and the state that surrounds it — one of the most culturally complex and geographically varied regions in the Americas, and the one that most clearly tells you what Mexico has been, and in many ways still is.
This is where this begins.
What the region actually is.
Oaxaca is the fifth-largest state in Mexico, running from the Pacific coast up over the Sierra Madre del Sur to a central highland valley and then further north to the Sierra Norte. Within this area — roughly the size of Portugal — sixteen distinct indigenous languages are still spoken as first languages in daily life. Zapotec and Mixtec are the most widely spoken, each with a literary tradition that goes back several centuries before Spanish arrival. Mazatec, Chinantec, Triqui, Chatino, Zoque, and several others continue in the more isolated parts of the state. UNESCO classifies most of them as endangered; in Oaxaca itself, they remain the languages of the market, the kitchen, the village square. Walking through the Mercado de Abastos on a Saturday morning, the languages you hear are not primarily Spanish.
The region's pre-Columbian heritage is older and deeper than the Maya sites the Yucatán is known for. Monte Albán — the Zapotec capital on a hilltop above the city of Oaxaca — was founded around 500 BC and occupied continuously for more than thirteen centuries. At its peak, around 500 AD, it was the largest city in Mesoamerica, with an estimated population of thirty thousand. The entire top of the hill was artificially levelled by hand over several generations to create a ceremonial plaza more than three hundred metres long, surrounded by pyramids, observatories, and one of the earliest known writing systems in the Americas. Monte Albán predates the rise of Teotihuacán. It predates the Aztecs by more than a thousand years. It is, in most ways that matter, where the civilisation that became Mexico actually began.
The city of Oaxaca itself — founded by the Spanish in 1532 on the ruins of a Zapotec town — was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. The old city is a grid of cobbled streets and low colonial buildings painted in the deep pinks, ochres, and greens that the region's natural pigments have always preferred. The cathedral on the zócalo. The basilica of La Soledad. The sixteenth-century former Dominican monastery of Santo Domingo, which houses both a church — with one of the most extraordinary gilded ceilings in Latin America, every surface painted and leafed — and a museum of pre-Columbian treasures including the gold of Tomb 7 at Monte Albán, among the richest single archaeological finds ever made in the Americas. The city is small enough to walk across in an afternoon. It takes a week to begin to understand.
“Sixteen indigenous languages still spoken in daily life. A civilisation that predates the Aztecs by a thousand years. A food culture older than any in the New World. And the coast, separately, is extraordinary.
What the kitchen holds.
The food of Oaxaca is a subject unto itself, and one of the main reasons the region has become, over the past decade or two, one of the quiet obsessions of the international food world. Oaxaca is one of the two states — along with Puebla — generally credited with being the birthplace of what the rest of the world now understands as Mexican food. The seven moles of Oaxaca — the elaborate sauces made from chilli, chocolate, seeds, spices, and a long list of other ingredients, each one simmered for most of a day — are the region's best-known contribution, and several of them are considered among the most complex dishes in the history of cooking. Mole negro contains upwards of thirty ingredients and takes experienced cooks most of a day to prepare. The dish has been made in the same families in the same valley since well before the Spanish arrived.
But mole is only the beginning. The tlayudas — enormous crispy tortillas topped with beans, cheese, and slow-cooked meat — are the street food that defines the city. The chapulines, the salted grasshoppers that have been eaten in the valley for more than two thousand years and that have genuinely become central to Oaxacan flavour. The quesillo, the local string cheese, made in the same way in the same villages for centuries. The tasajo, the thinly-sliced cured beef grilled over charcoal in every market in the state. The mezcal, which is native to Oaxaca and produced according to a process — the slow roasting of agave hearts in rock-lined pits dug into the ground — that predates Spanish arrival and has not fundamentally changed. The corn itself, grown in hundreds of distinct native varieties that the valley's farmers have been selecting and replanting, generation over generation, for somewhere around seven thousand years — longer than most European cuisines have existed in any form.
None of this is quaint, or preserved, or performed. The Oaxacan food economy is a working economy, and the markets of the city — the Mercado Benito Juárez, the 20 de Noviembre, the vast Mercado de Abastos on the edge of the city — are genuinely where the region eats. Stepping into any of them at lunchtime on a weekday is to step into a scene that has been running, with minor variations, for five centuries.
What the coast gives.
Oaxaca's other face is its coast, and this is the part of the state that most trip planning does not think to include. A short flight, or a four-hour drive through the mountains, takes you from the highland valley to the Pacific — specifically to the stretch around Puerto Escondido, which has been for several decades the favoured quiet coast for Mexicans who know the country well. This is not the Caribbean. The water is the cold Pacific, the beaches are edged with palm groves rather than jungle, the waves are serious enough that several of the surfing beaches here hold professional competitions, and the pace of the local towns is the pace of a rural fishing coast rather than a resort strip.
Puerto Escondido has, over the past few years, begun to attract more international attention, and the quiet town of ten years ago now contains a small but growing number of serious restaurants, design hotels, and creative studios. What has not changed is the geography. The coves immediately north and south of the town remain largely undeveloped. The beach of Playa Zicatela is four kilometres long, and most of it is empty most of the time. Further down the coast, around Punta Zicatela and the smaller communities of Barra de Navidad and Puerto Ángel, it is possible to be on a beach on a Pacific coast of Mexico and see, in the entire afternoon, no one at all.
The combination of the city and the coast — the highland cultural week followed by the Pacific decompression — is the form of an Oaxaca trip that works best for most travellers. Several days in the valley for the markets, the ruins, the food, and the crafts villages. Several days on the coast to rest, swim, and read. The two halves explain each other.
How it feels to be there.
The altitude of the valley — around one and a half thousand metres — changes the climate in ways that come as a quiet surprise to people who assumed Mexico was uniformly hot. Oaxaca City is warm in the day and genuinely cool at night. The dry season runs from November through April, with bright, clear days and temperatures that rarely climb above the mid-twenties. The wet season, May through October, delivers most of its rain in short late-afternoon storms that clear before sunset. The light above the valley — the thin, high-altitude, specifically Mexican light — is the reason every painter who has ever lived here has said the same thing about it.
Days in the valley arrange themselves around mornings in the city and afternoons in the villages or the ruins. Mornings begin at the markets — the fruit stalls, the mezcal tasters, the cooked-food sections where breakfast is served at long tables shared with strangers. A walk through the colonial centre. A coffee in one of the courtyards of the old buildings that have been converted into cafés and bookshops. Middays are for the villages: Teotitlán del Valle for the weavers, whose rugs and tapestries have been made on foot looms in the same families for generations; San Bartolo Coyotepec for the black pottery, dug from the specific clay of one hillside and fired in a way that produces the signature mirrored surface; Santa María del Tule for the ancient Montezuma cypress that is the largest tree in the world by trunk circumference, with a base more than forty metres around and an estimated age of somewhere between twelve hundred and three thousand years. Afternoons return to the city, to Monte Albán on a quieter day, or to one of the dozens of restaurants and studios that make Oaxaca one of the most creatively charged small cities in the Americas. Evenings are long and cool, and dinner happens late — the zócalo fills with families and musicians, and the restaurants along the quiet streets above it stay open without hurry until well past midnight.
The coast is different, as coasts always are. The days arrange themselves around the water. Early mornings for the beach before the sun gets high. Late mornings for breakfast at a palapa above the sand. Afternoons out of the sun. Evenings in front of the Pacific, which drops its sunsets in a way the sheltered Caribbean never does.
What we look for when we plan a stay here.
Oaxaca rewards an arrangement that combines the two halves of the state rather than choosing between them. The right week is usually five nights in the valley — in the city itself, or on an estate in the surrounding hills with the city within easy reach — and three or four on the coast. The movement between them is short enough to be painless, and the two halves describe a country that neither on its own quite does.
What we look for here: in the valley, a property that sits within the colonial fabric of the city, or an estate on the hills above it — something with real gardens, local craft, and a kitchen that takes the regional tradition seriously. Staff who know the markets, the villages, and the traditions, and who can arrange the things the ordinary visitor cannot: a mezcal-producer's tasting on his own palenque in the hills, a private tour of a working weaver's house, a cooking morning with a family in one of the valley villages. On the coast, a villa with direct beach access, set away from the busier strip, with outdoor space that handles the Pacific's real sun and wind rather than merely posing against it. And the right kitchen, because Oaxacan home cooking is one of the great pleasures of the region and the kind of thing most hotels do not quite understand how to produce.
Through our network we have access to stays in both halves of the state that sit within this standard. Each is arranged personally, matched to the group and the season, and handled from the Mexico City or direct arrival onward.
Who Oaxaca is right for.
Not those who want Mexico as a Caribbean beach with a flavour of tequila. That trip is widely available, well-executed, and delivers what it promises. It is a different trip.
This is for travellers who have understood that the most interesting countries in the world are rarely best experienced at the resort coast. For families with children old enough to be curious — the ruins, the markets, the weaving villages, the black pottery, the Pacific coast, and the food itself together produce a week that children remember for decades. For couples who have done the Yucatán and want the Mexico the Yucatán does not actually contain. For food people, who will find here some of the most serious cooking on the American continents, much of it in restaurants and markets that have not yet begun to feature in the international food press. For those interested in craft, because the weaving, the pottery, the mezcal, and the textile traditions of the valley are among the last genuinely living indigenous craft economies in the Americas. For those who have learned that the cultural centres of countries are almost never at the airport, and who are willing to give one of the great surviving indigenous cultures of the hemisphere the week it deserves.
Monte Albán has been empty for a thousand years. The weavers in Teotitlán have been at their looms for considerably longer. The corn in the fields is the corn the valley has grown for seven thousand years, and the mezcal is being distilled in the same way it was distilled before the Spanish arrived. None of it is in a hurry. The coast, at the other end of the state, runs on the Pacific's own time. Neither is in any particular danger of changing soon. But both reward the arrival of a traveller who has understood what they are, and who has made the journey to a part of the country that most of its visitors do not quite make it to.