A Week in Oaxaca

People go to Oaxaca for the food. They leave having also been converted to its art, its textiles, its mezcal, its altitude light, and its particular quality of stillness — a city that moves at its own pace and has no interest in accommodating yours. I went for seven days with two restaurant reservations and came back with a full notebook, a kilogram of chocolate, and the specific contentment of someone who has eaten correctly for an entire week.

The state of Oaxaca is one of Mexico's poorest by income and richest by culture. That combination — deprivation and abundance, international recognition and profound localness — gives the city a quality unlike anywhere else I have been.

The Mercado Benito Juárez

Come here on your first morning before you have eaten breakfast. Walk through it once without buying anything. Look at the mole paste vendors — the black mole, the red, the yellow, the manchamanteles that translates literally as "tablecloth stainer". Look at the chocolate grinders producing drinking chocolate from cacao and almonds and cinnamon in combinations that smell like something from a dream about Mexico you once had. Then go back and buy the mole paste and the chocolate and the dried chiles and the tejate powder. You cannot bring the cheese. You cannot carry the mezcal. But you can carry the essentials.

The seven moles

Oaxaca is called "the land of seven moles" and this is not marketing. The seven are a specific typology — negro, rojo, coloradito, amarillo, verde, chichilo, manchamanteles — each distinct in complexity, heat, sweetness, and occasion. A week gives you time to encounter most of them. Order mole negro with turkey if you see it on a menu outside a tourist area. Order the amarillo with vegetables at the market. Eat the coloradito with enchiladas at the place with no menu and plastic chairs on the street near the market's east entrance.

In Oaxaca the question is not where to eat. It is whether you can slow down enough to let the food happen to you.

Outside the city

Rent a car for one day and drive to Monte Albán in the morning when the site opens and the tour buses have not arrived. The Zapotec ruins sit on a levelled mountaintop above the valley and in the morning light they are extraordinary — a city made from a mountain, visible from thirty kilometres in every direction, built without wheels or iron tools. Spend two hours there. Come back via the villages of the Central Valleys, stopping at a mezcal producer if you can find one that will receive visitors.

Fly into Oaxaca City directly if you can. The domestic airport is small and the views on descent are of mountains and valleys and a city that looks, from the air, like it has been there since the beginning of everything. Which, in a sense, it has.

Mezcal and how to drink it

Mezcal is the indigenous spirit of Oaxaca in a way that tequila, despite its cultural prominence, is not: while tequila is made from one variety of agave in one region under industrial-scale production, mezcal is made from dozens of varieties in traditional ways by families who have been doing it for generations. The difference is audible in the glass. The first mezcal you drink in Oaxaca will taste nothing like the mezcal you have had outside Mexico, because most exported mezcal has been selected for international palates that find the terroir-heavy, smoky, sometimes funky character of traditional production difficult. The real thing is the most interesting spirit most visitors will have encountered.

Drink it as it is served: neat, at room temperature, in a small clay cup or a short glass, with a slice of orange and a pinch of sal de gusano — the salt made from ground agave worms and chilli that is the traditional accompaniment. Do not ask for ice. Do not mix it with anything. Sip rather than shoot. The mezcal serves as a meditation on the plant it came from, on the region, on the time it took to mature — an agave espadin takes seven to ten years to reach maturity; a tobalá takes twenty-five. Drinking it quickly is not the point.

Visit a palenque — a traditional mezcal distillery — if you can arrange it. The process is visible and extraordinary: the agave hearts roasted in earthen pits lined with hot rocks (which creates the smoke), then crushed by a horse-drawn stone wheel, fermented in open wooden vats with wild yeast, distilled twice in clay or copper pots. The whole operation is done by hand and by knowledge passed through families for generations. The mezcal that comes out of a palenque and into a bottle is the accumulated skill of that lineage and the specific character of the agave varieties in the surrounding land. It tastes like both of those things.

The crafts and what to know before you buy

Oaxaca produces some of the most distinguished folk art and craft in Mexico: black clay pottery (barro negro) from San Bartolo Coyotepec, hand-woven textiles from Teotitlán del Valle, carved and painted wooden figures (alebrijes) from Arrazola and San Martín Tilcajete, embroidered clothing from San Antonino Castillo Velasco. Each of these crafts has a village that is its centre and a tradition that is centuries old, and the direct purchase from the artisan in their workshop — bypassing the intermediary who brings the work to Oaxaca City and takes thirty to fifty per cent — is better for both buyer and maker.

The Tlacolula Sunday market, forty-five minutes east of Oaxaca City, is the largest indigenous market in the state and sells the full range of Oaxacan crafts alongside the food, livestock, and household goods that the surrounding communities actually need. It is attended almost entirely by local people and is the best possible context in which to understand what Oaxacan crafts look like in use rather than in a gallery or a tourist shop. The prices here are what things actually cost. The quality here is what things actually look like when they have not been selected for tourist aesthetics.

Bring considerably more space in your luggage than you think you will need. The problem of Oaxaca is not finding things worth buying. It is the weight limit on the return flight and the question of which beautiful thing to leave behind.

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