One thing that strikes you about Mérida is how people express their individualism  – quite often through their brightly coloured, sometime garish, sometimes ostentatious houses. The houses in the tightly packed inner-city barrios are largely the same height, but it’s the width and depth of the buildings that differentiates: some of them are really quite sprawling,…

Mérida, if you hadn’t realised already, is a pretty colourful place. Mind you, anywhere in Mexico is a riot of colour. But there’s something about the light here that makes colour particularly vivid. The yellows hum, the reds and pinks pop, the greens vibrate and the whites glare – but it’s also pastel tones on…

Our return to Mérida, exactly a year on, feels in many ways like coming home to our home away from home. It’s so very familiar, especially our colourful ‘hood’, Santiago, where familiar faces walk the streets and you’d swear nothing has changed. The characterful ladies at the local Tortillería in Mercado Santiago still acknowledge with…

We may have saved the best till last. The recently opened Museo Internacional del Barroco (2017) is quite simply breathtaking. It was designed by Japanese ‘starchitect’ Toyo Itō who was inspired by what he perceives as the three characteristic elements of Baroque art: Movement, Natural Light as Chiaroscuro and the Man-Nature relationship. The most striking feature…

There’s a truly wonderful and completely surprising museum in Puebla called the Amparo. It’s housed in a large 17th Century building in Centro Historico but, once you step inside, you’re in a far more modern world, a gleaming 21st Century glass atrium with light flooding in from a skylit roof and garden terrace. The Museo Amparo is…

In 1531, the invading Spanish authorities began a ‘trial Republic of Spaniards for Spaniards’ in the valley of Cuetlaxcoapan, naming it ‘City of the Angels’. The new city was supposed to show that a recently arrived Spaniard in these new lands of promise was capable of “self-sustainment without having to depend on the taxes of…

Cholula, just a short taxi-ride out of Puebla, is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Mexico and, at its zenith, the second largest city in the land after Tenochititlan, with an estimated population of 100,000. It’s thought that early Cholula was established around 500 BC and through several periods of development by 600 AD the…

We’re staying in a rather gorgeous 300-year-old casa in the very heart of Puebla, just a couple of blocks back from the Zócalo in the cutely named Barrio de los Sapos, the ‘Neighbourhood of the Toads’ and just off the Callejón de los Sapos, the ‘Alley of the Toads’ – named from colonial times when…

Officially there are 288 churches in Puebla, but ask any local and they’ll swear there are 365, one for every day of the year. And on first impression they might be right, as there does seem to be a church on pretty much every street corner here. Some of them so spectacular that they take…

We’re saying farewell to Cuernavaca after two glorious weeks in what Alexander von Humboldt referred to as ‘La Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera’ (City of Eternal Spring)  – that’s two weeks of gorgeous warm sunshine and flawless blue-sky days, so the city really does live up to its name.  In the early to mid-decades of the 20th Century,…