Oaxaca
Mezcal, adobe and the long Pacific coast.
Oaxaca is the state where Mexico is densest: sixteen indigenous languages, the country's best food, mezcal from villages that have distilled it for centuries, and a capital that looks as if someone turned up the colour.
Oaxaca city is baroque and green, with Santo Domingo as the church that sets the scale, and markets where you buy mole in seven colours. Mitla and Monte Albán, the Zapotec ruins, are an hour away. The craft — textiles from Teotitlán, black pottery from Coyotepec — isn't folkloric but alive.
Seven hours south, over the Sierra, lies Puerto Escondido on the Pacific: surfers, fishing boats, and for some years now houses that architects like Alberto Kalach have placed on the coast as if it were an exhibition space.
Oaxaca is two journeys. Do both.
We recommend Oaxaca to people who have done Mexico City and now want the country behind it. In the city: Otro Oaxaca, opposite Santo Domingo, a new building of brick and reclaimed wood behind a historic façade, with a rooftop pool. On the coast: Hotel Terrestre, fourteen villas with no air conditioning, fully solar-powered, beside Casa Wabi — a house that accepts the heat instead of fighting it. Come between November and March. Día de los Muertos in early November is in Oaxaca what it's meant to be — and correspondingly full.
