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The Guardian
28-04-2025
- The Guardian
Viva Zapotec! A thriving ecotourism project in Mexico's Oaxaca state
When I reach the mountaintop chapel, I slump on the dry stone wall, wheezing in the thin air, marvelling at what combination of brawn and piety must have been needed to build such a thing at such a height. It might not be a Sunday, but I can tell that mass at 3,000 metres must be magnificent. Open walls reach out to the rolling slopes of the Sierra Norte, 35 miles east of Oaxaca City in southern Mexico, with virgin pine in every direction. Somewhere unseen, a brown-backed solitaire bird lifts a lonely song over the valley. Then comes the bark of warring crows and, most exciting of all, the quick peeps of a hummingbird, believed here to ferry messages between the living and dead. At this height, even to a heathen like me, the urge to pay tribute is understandable. My guide, Eric, who must have a third lung, judging by his ability to tell stories on the climb, becomes quiet and crosses himself before the altar. I'm a little surprised at this show of devotion. Down in the small town of Tlacolula de Matamoros, he had shown us a site the Indigenous Zapotecs used to praise the sacred mountain above – before the Spanish came and plonked a church on the same spot. The colonialists' intention, Eric explained, was erasure. But when conversion comes at the point of a sword, some resistance seems inevitable. Here, Indigenous signs hide in Catholic icons. Dark stones in holy corners hold animist engravings. Duality is everywhere. Praise whispered in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of Christ to Mexican Catholics, is also meant for Huitzilopochtli, the old sun god. We climb to spectacular viewpoints, call out to jaguars, and watch wild horses gallop on wide green plains Eric gathers pine needles in a small clay cup and lights them on the altar together with chunks of amber resin, which glow as they catch. Then, as gifts for mother earth, he leaves an apple and a banana at the entrance. Finally, he goes back to the cup, and watches in silence as the smoke carries his wishes to the heavens. The mountain is just north of Llano Grande, one of the self-ruling villages in these mountains that form the Pueblos Mancomunados (united villages). Each holds a few hundred people living in log cabins, tending black roses, making tortillas on wood fires. It's a million miles from the shining streets and buzzing mezcal bars of Oaxaca City. Up here, when the sun drops, the air freezes; when I'm woken by the cock crow in the morning, I see the ground glazed with frost. Life in the clouds requires discipline. Lowlander decadence will not pull squash, beans and corn of all colours from the hard ground. The people abide by an iron rule: adults must commit one year in every three to community work. For some, that means policing. For others, it means forestry. And since the mid-1990s, it has also meant participating in their tourism project. View image in fullscreen A tourist with a guide in the Sierra Norte. Photograph: Chico Sanchez/Alamy Eric's company, Zapotrek, is one of a handful of trusted operators based in Oaxaca City that have developed partnerships with the mountain people. Booking secures permission to access the community, represented by a local chaperone for the duration of the trip. Ours, smiling Florencio, comes with three dogs, a laser eye for flora and a hunger for wasp larvae. He seems in no rush to complete his year of community service. Following his easy pace, we spend two days padding along gorgeous forest paths, soft as royal linen. We climb to spectacular viewpoints, call out in vain to jaguars, and watch wild horses gallop on wide green plains. The project seems a good deal. A gentle flow of visitors get sylvan splendour, while the hosts receive reliable revenue. That money is divided equally and has bought bigger, better cabins with hot water. But more importantly, it has allowed more people to stay in the communities they were born to. Economic gravity still drags young people to the cities, or across the border to the north. But now, if someone wants to stay here, they have more reason to. And despite the old distortions – the colonial invasions, repression of religion, prejudice against the Zapotec language – and more recent globalism, an ancient way of life adapts and carries on. Wishes made on mountaintops may come true. View image in fullscreen Tourists hike on a trail between La Neveria and Latuvi. Photograph: Jim West/Alamy This really matters. If you spend time in Mexico City, in the coffee shops of Roma Norte or La Condesa, you see familiar people. People with the same trainers, the same laptops, the same look of inbox worry. People who would make sense anywhere. The people of the Pueblos Mancomunados, however, are hard to picture anywhere but here. Their lives are green lives, bound with this land. It's as if Florencio could stop in his tracks, take root, sprout a great shimmering crown. Care for woods properly, as they do here, and to walk in them is to enter a pharmacy, a pantry, a gallery They tend to the forest; the forest tends them back. Eric explains there's a plant for everything. Poleo mint for fresh breath. Pine resin for splints. Corn silk tea for urinary tract infections. Corn husks to mould tamales. Bitter willow leaves for headaches. When food is scarce, they grind fresh agave hearts into flour. When water is needed, they look where the birch and ferns grow, and dig down. The undergrowth is a glittering mosaic. Pine and peeling madrones (evergreens) shine with silver mosses, bromeliads, bearded lichens. Bursts of Indian paintbrush plants glow red in the evening sun. Care for woods properly, as they do here, and to walk in them is to enter a pharmacy, a pantry, a gallery. View image in fullscreen James Gingell enjoys the local hospitality. Photograph: James Gingell When I come down from the mountains my eyes are wider. A few buses and a boat ride later, I'm on an empty jetty facing the lagoon of Chacahua. All the surfers and hippies are elsewhere; all the fishermen are hard at work. As the tide goes out, a sandbar appears 10 metres away; I wade to it with the low amber sun marbling in the cool water. Where the pool deepens, a flock of gulls gather and discuss their day in paradise. From the mangrove fringes, demon eyes leer out and a night heron appears with a meal in its mouth. Three pelicans wheel in from the sea, perform a survey loop, then divebomb so close I can see the fish squirm down their gullets. Finally the huge platinum moon arrives, the shallow boats chug back with the swordfish for dinner, and the birds stop bickering. Everything is silent in silhouette. I walk back home along the beach. The waves hush the village to sleep, each crest twinkling with bioluminescence. I look down to the sand and see footsteps, stretching forward to the huts with their palm roofs. The human prints wind together with those of other animals, the talons of kiskadees, maybe, or yellow kingbirds, and the tiny bores made by skittering crabs. Everything weaves on and on down the shore until disappearing into darkness. Zapotrek offers cycling and hiking trips from one day up to a week. A guided two-day hike for two, including taxi collection and return to Oaxaca City (two hours each way), all meals and a night in a cabin is £240pp
Boston Globe
21-02-2025
- 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
