Oaxaca City.
A city that has it all; surrounded by mountains, walkable, lovely architecture, impressive day trips, great cafes and of course, delicious food.
- The wonderful streets of Oaxaca City.
Oaxaca is beautiful. It has lovely pebbled streets, brightly coloured houses, gorgeous churches and pretty little courtyards. I knew very early on I’d love it. The plazas are a treat to wonder around, in particular Zocalo with vendors selling balloons on every corner.
They also love a fiesta; every night (and bizarrely, in the day) there were fireworks going off and we passed numerous parades including a procession into the Santo Domingo Temple with chants and fireworks!
2. Monte Albán.
Monte Albán is an incredible Zapotec city 20 minutes outside of Oaxaca. It was built 100 years before Jesus was born (!!) with temples, stone carvings AND they flattened the mountain top!
We wanted to go without the tour groups so took a shuttle for £2.33 ($58 return) from Mina 501.
3. Cafes and restaurants.
After a week of Mexican street food in Puerto Ángel I went on search for some greens!
Boulenc. I absolutely love this place. Amazing coffee, breakfast, cocktails and dinner. They do delightful salads AND there’s a patisserie attached to the restaurant which makes proper bread (mexico love to add sugar in theirs!). My favourite cafe in Oaxaca City.
Café Brújula Alcalá. A lovely little outside courtyard, and exceptional granola.
Cabuche. A wonderful cash-only Mexican cafe with seriously impressive fish tacos on blue corn tacos and jugs of flavoured water, turns out I can drink a lot of agua de tamarind.
Los Danzantes. This was my birthday meal so is a little fancier than the usual (still nothing crazy!). It has beautiful decor with zigzag brick walls and a small pond. Great cocktails, wine and food.
4. Galleries & Museums.
There are a lot of galleries and museums in Oaxaca, we decided to go to a gallery and the botanical gardens but heard good things about most museums in the city!
Contemporary Art Museum. The artists on show rotate, I was a big fan of the Mexican artist Irma Palacios who was on show when we were there.
Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca. You can only visit the botanical gardens on a 2 hour tour (which would normally put me off), but our eccentric American guide was brilliant. She was a fountain of knowledge explaining the plants and their history, and was very proud that the garden only showcases vegetation from Oaxaca state.
5. Accommodation.
Being my birthday we stayed somewhere a notch up from the usual hostel and it was greatly appreciated. Hotel Las Golondrinas has the most beautiful greenery surrounding the rooms and is a great location, definitely recommend!
6. Mexican cooking class.
Saved the best for last, mainly because I have so much to write!
We booked a cooking class with Augustin and met Esmeralda, the cook, at 11am to pick up ingredients from Mercado 20 de Noviembre, one of the best food markets in Oaxaca city. The cook talked us through a few of the ingredients including the crazy number of chillis there are in Mexico. We sampled raw cocoa, cocoa with cinnamon sugar and quesillo, stringy Oaxacan cheese.
The menu looked like this…
Dish 1: Tostada topped with guacamole, salsa picante, salsa de molcajete and spicy grasshoppers.
The real talking point is the grasshoppers, not normally something I’d go for but they were spiced so deliciously they were actually lovely sprinkled on tostadas.
Dish 2: Homemade tortilla memelita with spicy huitlacoche, courgette flowers, frijoles and quesillo.
The funnest part of this was making the tortillas. We made the dough, cupped it into balls and squished it with a large metal tortilla maker.
Dish 3: Fried empanada of Dish 2 smothered in frijoles and guacamole.
Dish 4: Mole Negro. Famously from Oaxaca this thick rich sauce is made from 26 ingredients including 4 different types of chilli. The main highlight (lowlight?) of making Mole Negro was frying the dried chillis. The recipe kindly says ‘note: you can almost choke on this’, that’s no exaggeration. We were all coughing and spluttering as the kitchen filled with smoke, the kind that hits you at the back of the throat, not a chance I could pull that off in my flat!
The day started at 11am and finished around 7pm, that’s a hell of a lot of food.
A parting note on Oaxaca…my mind was blown when I found out it’s pronounced Wahaca (!!), as in the Mexican restaurant chain in the UK. I had no idea.
We visited Oaxaca City in October 2018.
