Guadalajara: Crafts, food and near-perfect weather draw visitors to Mexico's second-largest city
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"If you ever need a story about all the reasons not to go to Mexico, just ask me," a friend offered recently.
She was recalling her first and only trip to Mexico, a week she spent in Cancun. Her memories were of getting sick from eating a soup of murky broth and chopped-up hot dog, paying $4 for an ice-cream cone and staying in an American-style motel room rank with fumes from a kitchen exhaust fan.
My own first experience was a bit different. Like my friend, I came away with a lasting impression that's colored my views ever since. Beach resorts are only part of the picture; cities are where Mexico gets real.
My first visit to Mexico was to Hermosillio, a workaday town in Sonora, about 170 miles from the Arizona border. A friend had business at a maquiladora — an American factory — and invited me to come along. While he worked, I rode local buses, went to a baby shower and practiced my high-school Spanish on the street vendors.
Mexico away from the resorts had its charms, I decided, and on future trips I made it a point to seek out places that offered the chance to enjoy the local culture along with the warm weather.
Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, and its neighboring artists' villages of Tlaquepaque and Tonalá, fit that description. While the rest of Mexico sweats, Tapatíos, as the locals call themselves, bask year-round in near perfect springtime weather. At an altitude of 5,000 feet, Guadalajara is never cold and rarely humid. Daytime temperatures hover in the 80s. The evenings are balmy and cool.
Mexican tourists come not for the beaches (Guadalajara is inland, in the center of the state of Jalisco, about a five-hour drive from Puerto Vallarta), but for the weather, food, tequila and the shopping.
So why, after one night here, was I feeling like my friend who visited Cancun?
Our room at the Hotel Francés, a nearly 400-year-old hotel with sweeping wood and marble staircases in the heart of Guadalajara's historic center, was charming enough, but the pounding music from the disco next door kept us awake until 5 a.m.
At breakfast the next morning, my husband's huevos rancheros arrived topped with two limp squares of American cheese. And later that day, as we ate dinner under spinning ceiling fans in the courtyard of an old colonial mansion, a waiter secretly copied our credit-card number and used it to run up $5,000 worth of illegal charges.
So much for the "real Mexico."
Then, as sometimes happens, things began to change, once we switched hotels and straightened out the credit-card problem. Three blocks away we found the San Francisco Plaza, a restored mansion with courtyards and fountains where $50 bought us a large, quiet room and a buffet breakfast of fresh fruits, scrambled eggs and homemade tamales.
From here it was an easy stroll through downtown back streets to the Plaza de Armas, the central square near the 16th-century Catedral de Guadalajara. We took in a free evening classical-music concert where musicians play in a Parisian-built bandstand, and snacked on street-vendor fare — drinks made from fresh fruit and parfaits of roasted corn and sour cream layered in plastic cups.
A few days later in Tlaquepaque, a nearby former potters' village known for its shops selling ceramics, silver, blown glass and pottery at bargain prices, we found La Villa del Ensueño, a Mexican style bed-and-breakfast inn.
We weren't impressed with its location on a street anchored by run-down buildings covered with graffiti. But hidden behind its high stucco walls were spacious rooms with brick patios and a living room with a fireplace where we sipped coffee on chilly mornings and cooled off with margaritas in the hot afternoons.
Mexico was starting to grow on me again.
The reasons unfolded over the next few days as we saw museums, craftsmen's workshops and outdoor markets in neighborhoods that resembled parts of Mexico City but on a smaller scale and without the pollution, noise and safety problems.
Walking turned out to be the best way to get around, but to get our bearings, we flagged down a horse-drawn carriage, and for about $12 negotiated an hour's ride around Guadalajara's historic center. Founded in 1530, Guadalajara is both a colonial city and modern city, with its major churches, government buildings and museums within blocks of each other in an area marked off by four plazas.
Our driver pointed out the sites as our horse clomped along cobblestone streets: Behind the cathedral with its golden spires, was the Teatro Degollado, home to the city's opera company. Folding chairs were set up outside for the University of Guadalajara's Folkloric Ballet, which performs free on Sundays.
Next came the Plaza Tapatía, a pedestrian-only zone and home to anyone who can make a living shining shoes, playing the xylophone or selling cotton candy. From here, it's a short walk to a sculpture garden filled with whimsical bronze chairs in the shape of elephants and people. It's also the location of the city's most impressive piece of architecture, the Cabañas Cultural Institute, a neoclassical building built in the 1800s as a home for orphans, now devoted to art exhibits and cultural events.
Our driver let us off at Mercado Libertad. Inside were rows of stalls stacked with leather shoes, watches and Christmas decorations. We watched as a woman sat in the aisle peeling avocados, tomatoes and onions for gazpacho sold in bowl-shaped glasses at makeshift seafood restaurants.
It all looked tempting, but we had something else in mind for lunch. We spotted an area near our hotel called Las Nueve Esquinas. Once the site of the city's slaughterhouse, it's a newly spiffed-up historic district with storefront print shops and squares that create a village-like atmosphere in the heart of the city.
The neighborhood specialty is birria, goat meat roasted overnight, shredded and seasoned with spices. At Birria Las Nueve Esquinas, an open-air restaurant with tile walls and tables covered with blue-and-yellow plaid cloths, it comes in two sizes, small and large for $3 and $4.
"Es caliente, pero no mucho." "It's hot, but not too hot," our waitress assured us. Our meals were served with a bowl of chopped red onions and rice. The meat was like a tender stew, and we soaked it up with warm tortillas washed down with cold beer. The bill was $9.
Tlaquepaque, a suburb about four miles away, is the best place to sample the more sophisticated dishes for which this part of Mexico is known. Bus loads of tourists flock here to shop the smart boutiques along Avenida Independencia. Afterward they hit the restaurants for local specialties such as sweet bell peppers stuffed with pear and pineapple and topped with pomegranate seeds, and cafe de olla, thick black coffee sweetened with cinnamon and raw sugar.
The village and the neighboring town of Tonalá are the centers of craft-making in Mexico. Most people come for a day of shopping and lunch, then leave. But with the Villa del Ensueño as our base, we found plenty of reasons to linger.
After the shops close, locals gather in Tlaquepaque's town square to graze among the street vendor stalls. Manuel Rayes, 74, comes here each night with a cart stocked with containers of vanilla pudding made by his wife. Others sell roasted corn, hot dogs on a stick and chunks of fresh sugar cane. Much of the activity centers around El Parián, a block-long cantina filled with restaurants and bars. Mariachi music originated in this part of Mexico, and the strolling bands that weave among the tables are the main attraction.
Originally called Tlacapan, which means "men who make clay utensils with their hands," Tlaquepaque has a reputation for one-of-a-kind craftsmanship, much of which goes on inside workshops hidden from public view behind locked doors with no windows.
In scruffier Tonalá, much of the merchandise is mass-produced for export to the United States, and nearly every retail storefront has an artist's studio in the back. Finding someone at work is as easy as spotting something in the huge outdoor bazaar that's held here each Thursday and Sunday and asking where it was made.
When a piece of black pottery etched with an Aztec design caught our eye at Gloria Campechano's market stall, she gave us a handwritten business card and pointed us in the direction of her husband's workshop a few blocks away.
We knocked on the door. Pablo Mateos, dressed in a sweat shirt and blue jeans, greeted us, and having no idea who we were, stopped what he was doing to show us around his backyard workshop. He urged us to feel a clump of the cool black clay he uses to fashion vases and pots in a 200-year-old kiln heated by a wood fire. But when we asked about buying one, he said there were none left: All had been shipped to the United States.
A few doors down on Avenue Hildago, we found Galeria Bernabe, where four generations of family members have been making a unique style of pottery called barro petatillo for more than 200 years. Daniel Bernabe, whose father, José, now heads the family business, led us into a courtyard filled with unfinished pieces, picked up a clay pot, and using a brush made of duck feathers, demonstrated the "petatillo" technique of creating a shaded area with a series of finely crisscrossed blue and white lines.
If one person worked on a piece start to finish, it would take him 15 days to complete, Bernabe told us. But with each of seven brothers and other family members responsible for different stages of the work, the family produces enough plates, vases and pots to fill its retail store and do a brisk export business.
Finding workshops open to the public was more of a challenge in Tlaquepaque. The retailers would prefer you buy in the stores, but if you know someone who can point you in the right direction, you can buy directly from an artist.
One day, after admiring a colorful ceramic brooch in the shape of a sun for sale in our hotel, we went in search of its maker. The artist had no retail outlet, but we had an address and by chance, we found Carlos Garcia unlocking the gate to the Carlos Albert workshop just as we walked by. Inside were giant papier-mâché dinosaurs, and in the back, artists painting lifelike expressions on the faces of giant versions of the suns and moons we had seen in the hotel.
Garcia and his partner, Albert Ickenroth, run Zoo Life, a company that produced some of the animal creatures inside Rainforest Cafe restaurants in the United States. Their jewelry, as it turned out, was not sold anywhere in Tlaquepaque, only in shops in the U.S. and Europe and here, among the dinosaurs and giant moons in a workshop hidden from view by a black garage door.
Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com.