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Boston Globe

A trek to the small villages in Mexico's Sierra Norte highlands

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up We arrived there after a week in Puerto Escondido, a surfing mecca on the Pacific Coast. A recently built highway has transformed the bohemian enclave — once only reachable from Oaxaca by propeller plane or a nauseating nine-hour drive — into a bustling beach getaway. On our trip, traffic gridlocked the main drag. The cellular network regularly collapsed. When I asked the chef at my favorite fish taco stand how he was handling the onslaught, he theatrically fell to the ground in exhaustion — and then genuinely struggled to pick himself back up. Advertisement Los Pueblos Mancomunados felt removed from all this. And not by accident. The villages are run by a committee that, in 1998, created an ecotourism program called Expediciones Sierra Norte to promote and preserve the region's nature and indigenous Zapotec heritage. For much of the 20th century, Canadian paper and mining companies had their way with the land. But in the 1980s, the towns banded together to resist the plundering of their land and eventually restore local control over their resources. Today, a self-ruling cooperative system governs how those resources are shared and protected. Each member of the community must complete a year or two of service in their village; such as running a comedor, or restaurant, maintaining the adobe visitor cabins, or serving as a forest guide. The profits of the tourism initiative are shared among the villages, mitigating the problem of urban emigration that so many rural communities now face. Advertisement The wood-powered stovetop at a local comedor in the village of Cuajimoloyas brims with short ribs, yellow mole, atole, and other breakfast delicacies. Hanna Krueger Visitors can head into these mountains alone. But everything I read recommended hiring a guide; not for safety — crime levels are low in this region — but rather for a much deeper experience. We enlisted Zapotrek, an outfitter headquartered in Oaxaca and operated by Eric Ramirez, the grandson of a traditional Zapotec farmer. Ramirez organized our entire itinerary — hiking route, accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and local guides — and joined us on our journey, providing tremendous company, translation services, and limitless knowledge of indigenous culture, botany, and Mexican politics. Our three-day personally curated itinerary brought us to four of the eight pueblos over three days — two spent hiking and one by horseback. (Mountain biking is also an option.) The first day involved a 10-mile hike to Lachatao, a small village of 1,000, perched on a ridge of a mountain. Late in the afternoon, a doe-eyed mutt met us at the edge of the village. We followed him to the farm of Martha Santiago Cruz, who greeted us with a large pitcher of homemade pulque, a beverage made from fermented agave sap. Dogs — large, small, scruffy, young, old, and always friendly — abound in Los Pueblos Moncomunados. Here, one perches on the balcony of a home on the outskirts of Lachatao. Tareq Habash The drink has a consistency reminiscent of kombucha, a milky white appearance, and a calming effect on the stomach. Cruz treated us to pitcher after pitcher of the probiotic, infusing it each time with a new flavor: banana, guava and sugar cane, locally known as piloncillo. In between sips, she shared tales of schlepping and selling her pulque in markets dozens of miles away, dwarfing our day's trek and putting my aching legs to shame. Advertisement Each time my resolve faltered in the final hour of our daily hikes, I thought of the feast awaiting me in the next village. The villagers' traditional cuisine is as much an appeal as the landscape from which they harvest their ingredients — by hand and ox. Each comedor felt like a home kitchen with soups in earthenware pots bubbling atop wood fire stoves. We ordered by just pointing at whatever looked enticing. For breakfast, we often sipped atole, a traditional hot drink made from maize and sugar cane, akin to porridge and a vital defense against the chill of the mountains. A home-cooked meal, such as this one at the top of Lachatao, awaits hikers in every town. A glass of agua de jamaica, or hibiscus iced tea, sits in the background. Tareq Habash During one hike, we stopped for truchas, the trouts native to the mountain rivers. We fished for our ingredients from the natural pools of a local farm and 20 minutes later we were devouring a whole fish, roasted on the fire-power oven and filled with quesillo, pico de Gallo, and garlic. And that is to say nothing of the hongos, or mushrooms, that crop up in the mountains during the summer rainy season. Thousands of mushroom species — many of them edible — have been found in the forests around the villages, leading to a deep regional reverence for fungi. An annual mushroom festival, La Feria Regional, in Cuajimoloyas, takes place every summer in late July or early August, depending on the rains. On Saturday local guides escort groups into the forest to scavenge for mushroom species. And on Sunday, each group puts their discoveries on display for experts to inspect and explain, cooks to use in cuisine, and visitors to marvel at. Advertisement The elderly dog of a pulque brewer, Martha Santiago Cruz, greets the author at the end of a 10-mile hike to Lachatao. Tareq Habash We stayed in Cuajimoloyas on our last night and made an 8 p.m. date with the medicine woman who lived next door to our adobe cabin. Zapotec culture reveres traditional healers, who wield the power of plants and mysticism to cure internal and external ailments. That night, we planned to take part in a temazcals, a traditional sweat lodge designed to cleanse the body and mind. Aware of the heat that lay ahead, I stepped out to fill my water bottle at the camping lodge. The night air was cool and thin and smelled of burning firewood. The sky was dotted with stars. From the hillside, I could distinguish the edges of the village — the boundaries where the lights ceased to exist and the faint outlines of mossy pine forest began. Dogs barked. The giant communal speaker at the town hall crackled to life; some townsperson had stopped by with a song request, a slow, sentimental ballad. The music reached every corner of Cuajimoloyas and a woman danced on the sidewalk under a streetlight. When I returned home, someone had stopped by our cabin and lit a fire to stave off the cold. The author and her local guides walk through a local trout farm outside of Cuajimoloyas. Tareq Habash The next day, we would head back to the city, and reunite with the cellphone we had accidentally left in the crevice of the taxi that drove us into the mountains days earlier. It wouldn't have been of much use. Cell service and internet connection are, graciously, rarities in these towns. Even without the upcoming flight notifications, I wasn't too naive to believe that the outside world couldn't creep its way into Los Pueblos Mancomunados. After all, mining companies still had a foothold nearby. Climate change-induced droughts threatened the water supply that sustained the towns and crops. The townspeople still had to descend into the city every now and then. Advertisement On a hike earlier that day, our local guide told me that his son recently died due to complications after wisdom tooth surgery in Oaxaca. Obvious malpractice — but what to do? He didn't have the money for a lawyer and, even if he did, the legal battle wouldn't bring his son back, he reasoned. The local guides of Los Pueblos Mancomunados have encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Sierra Nortes — and tremendously good humor as well. Tareq Habash We snaked our way down the mountain on a gravel road the following afternoon, after stocking up on dried apples and quince bars. A blur of agave plants and pine trees could be spotted outside our windows. Wandering oxen slowed our journey. And, then, the gravel turned to pavement. Our phones buzzed. Then buzzed again. Restaurant after restaurant cropped up along the highway. We reached the city center in less than two hours and were deposited on a sidewalk lined with colorful Spanish colonial buildings. Our hair still smelled of campfire as we hugged Eric goodbye. Hanna Krueger can be reached at