Blog 13: Tourism in Michoacán 7 January 2011 Our Kingston colleague Vicky Venturini is
here for a week, and Dan Carpenter and Jean Maxon-Carpenter are arriving in a
couple of days, providing us with a gol Anyway, if you ever find yourself in these
parts for a week o Tzintzuntzan – Ancient capital of the
Tarascan Empire, with some spectacular yácatas
overlooking Lake Pátzcuaro. Yácatas are the huge temple bases on which the
Tarascans erected their worship places. You’ve all seen, or seen pictures of,
Mexican pyramids. Well these yácatas are nothing like them. Totally different
aesthetic. Five 80x20 meter rectangles, tapering toward the top, each with a
circular add-on facing the lake. The platform on which they are built is a
half-kilometer long and some 20 meters high. There’s a nice little museum on
the site, too, with ancient bells and teapots and obsidian knives.... The
Tarascans were good metal workers and ceramicists and sculptors. Still are. When you get tired of the hot sun beating down on the ruins, you can visit the atrio (i.e., the large park in front) of
the Franciscan convent, the earliest in Michoacán. The friars planted smuggled
olive tree starts, and the survivors are the oldest olive trees in the
Americas. The friars had to smuggle them (say 10 Pater nosters), because
Peninsular Spain jealously guarded its monopoly on olive oil, and taxed it to
the last golden drop when they shipped it to the New World. I’m surprised that
the colonists didn’t stage a Veracruz Olive Oil Party, tossing the casks into
the sea to protest the taxes. When you tire of the shade, there’s always the handicraft market, chock full of local pottery and the straw doodads that are Tzintzuntzan’s main manufacture. Cupatitzio National Park – in Uruapán, of
recent infamy when the hooligans of drug cartel A went to a restaurant where
the chiefs of drug cartel B were dining and rolled the severed heads of several
other members of drug cartel B through the door as if they were bowling balls.
As I recall, no one stayed for desert. Still, narco-nonsense has nothing to do
with the park, a tropical botanical extravaganza that lines both sides of a
deep ravine on the city’s outskirts. It’s a favorite with joggers, strollers,
young lovers, and older lovers like ourselves. At the high end a massive spring
bubbles out of the earth to feed the river that makes the avocado orchards
south of Uruapan some of the richest in the world. The park has been
intensively crafted into a kind of romantic jungle fantasy, with trickling
(rushing, cascading and leaping) water everywhere, sluicing through rustic
stone channels that must have been designed by an aquitect who apprenticed at
the Alhambra in Granada. Towering trees. Gigantic leaves. Tangled roots adhering to walls. Exotic flowers, vines, and ferns. Strangler figs. Not to mention strategically placed nosh stands selling fresh tropical fruit, quesadillas, soft drinks, and grilled trout plucked to order from Cupatitzio’s trout farm. Angahuan and Paricutín – Alas, poor
Parangaricútiro, the town that had the misfortune on February 20, 1943, to be
sitting next to a cornfield that began
to smoke and spit and shake and … Kaboom! In the geologic wink of an eye (9
years, 11 days, and 10 hours) the towns of Paricutín and Parangaricútiro were
buried in dense black lava. The town of Paricutín gave its name and all of its
buildings to the new volcano, whose ash blanketed much of central Mexico and
for a time made agriculture impossible anywhere near the new volcano. On the
other hand, Paricutín became an attraction for journalists and scientists of
both the social and physical persuasion. It also spawned a tourist industry for
avid consumers of such things like Vicky and me. We rented horses in nearby
Angahuan, and with our hostler leading the way, threaded down through pitch
pine forests and out onto the lava field. There a hard, hot scramble lead us to
the surviving relic of Parangaricútiro, the top half of its stone church. The
bottom half, presumably still intact, is encased in lava. If you make this
trip, and you still have land legs when you dismount, you can visit the town of
Angahuan, one of the most traditional Purhépecha speaking Tarascan communities
in western Michoacán. The villagers still live in traditional houses and the
women and children still dress in traditional styles. Bonus: Angahuan’s 16th-century
church façade features Mexico’s only image of Santiago as pilgrim. Second bonus: if you arrive on market day, you will not only hear Purhépecha, but you can bargain with the male vendors in English, since they’ve all done service as apple pickers in Washington or chicken pluckers in Arkansas.
Pátzcuaro – ah, but that is for another day. David & Linda & Vicky |