The Cuernavaca Mercado

The Cuernavaca Mercado (market) is a sprawling thing that winds around and up and down. Very easy to get lost in. It's located in an arroyo just about 6 blocks east of downtown and the plaza. Much of it seems under ground with many alleys that bring you up to city streets. Just about everything is for sale but mostly divided into sections of flower sellers, meat, vegetable, herbs, clothes and music CD's. You might even see a small boy run by with a pigs head.

When I was taking Spanish classes at Encuentros I also took some evening cooking lessons. Most of our assignments included a shopping list 'in Spanish' and we were to shop at the central market before class. You'd be surprised at how many flavors of 'mole' there are. We had some very good meals those evenings.

I recently heard much of the market was damaged by fire this year. YouTube Video of the fire

Deep inside the Cuernavaca market

Steps up to street level

Bags of herbs

Women in the vegetable section

Tepoztlan

Tepoztlán is only about a 40 minute drive from Cuernavaca either on a Cuota or a Libre thru a few small towns. The most interesting part of Tepoztlán is it's location in a valley surrounded with striking rock formations. There is also a cool church, an ex-convento with a museo and a large market. Other than that, it's a small town worth a few hours.



View of the church with backdrop of mountains


The church


The museum


The market


One of the most interesting side-trips from Cuernavaca is to TEPOZTLÁN , just 20km to the northeast, and dramatically sited in a narrow valley spectacularly ringed by volcanic mountains. Until recently this was an entirely different world, an isolated agrarian community inhabited by Nahuatl-speaking people whose life can have changed little between the time of the Conquest and the beginning of the twentieth century. It was on Tepoztlán that Oscar Lewis based his classic study of Life in a Mexican Village and traced the effects of the Revolution on it: the village was an important stronghold of the original Zapatista movement

It's also the village where Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent god of the Aztecs, was born.