Blissful Adventures

The colonial city of San Miguel de Allende was founded by the Spanish in 1555 on the site of a village belonging to the Guamare people. There were numerous wars and skirmishes before the Spanish took full control and San Miguel became a major trading post for the many silver mines in the surrounding mountains. The city virtually died at the end of the 19th century and only came back to life because of its beautiful architecture and pleasing landscapes...

The first art institute was set up in 1938 and became hugely popular after the Second World War when demob'd G.I.s were given grants to study abroad. How many actually became artists and how many just had a great time in the sun will never be known, but the art schools and institutes thrived as word spread. Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston became a well-known artist here before his death in 2015, and we dined several times in the restaurant featuring many of his works like this...

Painting or photographing San Miguel is a religious experience for many, and it is religion that shaped this city. After we were held captive in a monastery in Spain several years ago you might question our decision to stay in a convent in San Miguel. However, unlike the monastery in Caravaca, the Posada Altea has been de-consecrated and no longer has bars on the windows. The topiary in the convent's grounds is impressive...

As is this little bird that sat outside our window every morning and sang to us...

The steeply graded cobbled streets rising to the heights of San Miguel are a blaze of living colour...

And the city is topped off with the parish church of San Miguel Arcángel - one of the most photographed and painted churches in Mexico. Here is the church glowing in the setting sun...

The Gothic bell tower and façade was constructed in 1880 by an indigenous bricklayer, Zeferino Gutierrez, based purely on picture postcards of European churches.
There is a wealth of ecclesiastical statuary in the city centre but this sweet depiction of Mary stands in our hotel's grounds...

And this is one of the many statues of religious figures in San Miguel...

Despite its high altitude and low rainfall, the residents of San Miguel have impressive gardens that they can replenish every year at this time. Benito Juarez park has been the site of an annual floral and artisans festival since the 70s and we wandered, with growing jealousy, past hundreds of displays of plants and flowers that wouldn't last five minutes in our garden...

San Miguel is a ten hour drive from the U.S. border and cars with Californian and Texas licence plates are ten a peso. Every other person on the street is a gringo and this is reflected in the spiralling price of real estate. The restaurants, liquor stores and supermarkets cater to their tastes and there are sufficient Irish pubs and Boston pizzerias to put a smile on any New Yorker's face. But San Miguel is a wonderful place to visit: not least because all motorists, even taxi drivers, give way to pedestrians even when they are not on a pedestrian crossing. This never happens anywhere in Latin America and it came as a complete, but pleasant, surprise.

There is a reason why San Miguel de Allende is on the palette list of almost every artist around the globe. If you can't find something to paint here you might as well take up writing. It's not simply that foreign artists have been coming here since the 1930's to put brush to canvas, they've also taken out their creative impulses on many of the city's buildings. Earthy terracotta tones turn almost every cobble-stoned street into a three dimensional canvass that we can walk into and be absorbed by...

But we are bland additions in comparison to this doll seller in colourful costume who adds piquancy to a scene that needs no description...

There are a million street scenes worthy of the attention of a modern day Michelangelo here in San Miguel. This recycler's barrow is a picture in itself..

And this is just one of the dozens of tiny shops that flaunts its vibrant wares in the hope of catching a passing eye...

Every street corner brings into view another perfect picture as we climb higher and higher into the city's main square. Sometimes we find only a blank terracotta canvas, but then we round a corner and find ourselves mesmerised by a giant mural...

The murals on the walls and ceiling of the public library are so loud that they defy the “Silencio” signs to scream, “Look at me”...

While the walls inside all the restaurants have become galleries for a multitude of local artists or have been turned into works of art in their own right...

This is the weekend of the Festival of the Candelaria. Last year at this time we were in Puno on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca to witness the colourful parade of 65,000 costumed indigenous dancers and musicians. Candelaria is celebrated less colourfully in San Miguel with a horticultural market and artisans' fair in the city's main park. However, we think these brightly hued pots would look great in our garden...

Not all of the pictures in San Miguel have been wrought by human hand – nature has played its part to make this one of the most beautiful cities we have ever visited. The orange tree in the garden of the ancient convent where we are staying makes it's own glorious artwork against the background of the bell tower...

Bell towers and churches abound in San Miguel - stay tuned for a religious experience.

It's Tuesday and as Mexico City re-opened its doors to tourists we had a lot of catching up to do. The city's sights are scattered and we had to ditch our original plans and be selective. We started with the enormous National Palace which was built by the Spanish on the same site and using the same materials as the Aztec emperor, Montezuma's, grand palace...

This is just one of the fourteen inner courtyards...

The palace and its museum could be a whole week's worth of sightseeing, fortunately for us only a small proportion is open to the public. However, we soon learned that Mexico City is all about Rivera Diego. His murals and paintings are plastered everywhere. This is one of many depicting pre-colonial life...

And this is the huge mural on the main staircase of the palace...

This nearly 5,000 square foot mural depicts the history of Mexico from 1521 to 1930 and took Rivera six years to complete. While the artist depicts Mexico as a Marxist utopia in the early 20th century he somehow manages to put America's wealthiest capitalists like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and J.P.Morgan into the frame, alongside his own wife, Freda Kahlo... Art historians please explain.

This is one of the historic streets near the Palace which are are filled with people scratching a living by selling all manner of knick-knacks, or setting up mini kitchens offering inexpensive tortillas...

There are many disfigured and disabled beggars, but almost every street has at least one church with an elaborate dome or decorated bell tower and some of the gilded interiors must be worth a fortune. This is just one of the many altar screens in the Metropolitan Cathedral...

The Metropolitan Cathedral is sinking, along with the rest of the city at an alarming 3 feet a year. (That is not a typo). Mexico City is nearly seven thousand five hundred feet above sea level, but it was built on a lake bed of soft clay. As the growing city sucks water out of the ground for its daily needs, the ground continually shrinks beneath it. At the current rate, (which is actually accelerating), the city will be 300 feet lower by the end of the century, and many of these buildings and grand arches may collapse...

Mexico City's aging subway system may also be in trouble. The trains have pneumatic rubber tyres so the ride is quiet and smooth, but there are few escalators and miles of grotty underground walkways linking connecting lines. We sometimes felt we were walking to our next destination, not just changing trains. The good news – each ride of any duration is just 33 cents Cdn. The trains are frequent and, despite warnings, not overly crowded, but it took us a long time to navigate the city. Next stop – the Palace of Bellas Artes where we again ran into Senor Diego's murals. However, as it is Tuesday and we paid a modest entry fee, we got to see the art-nouvea foyer without a thousand people clamouring for free tickets...

Now it's Wednesday and we have left Mexico City for San Miguel de Allende. Next time we visit Mexico City we will return mid-week to see the rest of the place.

We changed our plans for our visit to Mexico City and so arrived at the weekend. We have learned some valuable lessons. First the good news...

Mexico City is renowned for its nightmarish traffic, but on Sundays many of the roads in the city's historic centre are closed. Only cyclists and pedestrians are allowed. Without the traffic the air was crystal clear and we had some clear views of the many historic buildings in the sunshine.
This is the Church of San Hipolito. It was built in 1729 on the spot where the Spanish finally conquered the Aztecs in 1531...

This is the the Modern Art Gallery on the right, behind the ad-hoc artisans' market...

However, the city's museums,galleries and parks, have free entry every weekend. Which brings us to the bad news. Almost everywhere we had planned to visit Saturday and Sunday was thronged with a sizeable proportion of the more than 20 million plus locals all taking advantage of the offer, leaving us on the end of some very long queues in the baking sun. One incredibly beautiful building that was not packed was the Post Office. But Mexico City's central post office is no ordinary postman's hangout...

It is called the Palacio Postal, (The Postal Palace), for good reason. This is the grand staircase...

We soon gave up on the other museums and galleries and spent our time people watching in the parks. This is the entrance to Chapultepec park on Sunday afternoon...

Chapultepec park covers 1,700 acres and is one of the largest urban parks in the world – second in size only to the central park in Santiago. The park has 15 million visitors a year and most of them seemed to be there on Sunday. We would have taken a pedalo out on the lake – but 5,000 people beat us to it...

With so many people out to enjoy themselves Mexico City's parks become sprawling outdoor markets at the weekends filled with stalls laden with cheap trinkets and vast amounts of fast food. Size matters here and Mexicans are no different to anyone else -they can't resist a super-sized treat. These lollipops and discs of candied nuts were huge...

But we were amazed that people were actually buying candy floss bigger than their kids...

So that was our weekend. We still have Monday and Tuesday. But wait: all the museums,galleries, and even the parks, are closed on Mondays in Mexico City. Lesson learned – don't change your plans without doing some research.

Our day started in Guatemala City at 4am when we took the hotel shuttle to the airport for our flight to Mexico. We flew past one of the world's most active volcanoes, Popocatapetl, which erupted just a few days ago and disrupted flights with a plume of ash 4 kilometres in the air. It gave us no trouble today and by 11am we had dropped our bags at our hotel in the Condesa District of Mexico City, had a late breakfast, and took the open-topped tour bus to get an overview of this capital. First, a glimpse of the modern city soaring above the tree lined boulevards...

The city's parks and squares are filled with statues of the great and the good, including this very famous one of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhte'moc. His feet were immersed in boiling oil in the early 16th century by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes in order to extract the whereabouts of Montezuma's gold. Cuauhte'moc was tortured for three years before being hung - probably a relief.

Cortes got his hands on some of the Aztec's treasure, but Montezuma is still getting his revenge on foreign invaders – though, luckily, not on us on this trip so far.
Christophe Colon, (Christopher Columbus), was probably to blame for the catastrophe that befell the Aztecs, along with the Toltecs, Mayans and numerous other indigenous civilizations in the Americas, but he is seen as a hero throughout the continents of the New World. This is his statue in Mexico City...

The historic central square in Mexico City, known as the Zocalo, is surrounded by magnificent buildings and the largest cathedral in Latin America...

The Spanish built the cathedral on the site of the Aztec's Templo Mayor and, to add insult to injury, even used some of the building materials from the temple. The Zocalo was the principle ceremonial site for the Aztecs prior to the Spanish invasion – yet another reason for Montezuma's revenge.

The monumental entrance to the Central Park in the heart of the city is quite magnificent...

And the nearby Palacio de Bellas Artes is a stunning building that hosts cultural events including music, dance and opera....

There are so many important buildings, museums and galleries in Mexico City that we will have difficulty getting to all of them in the next three days – but we will try. Here are a couple to begin with...

This enormous triumphal arch in the Plaza de la Republica commemorates the revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1920 and radically reformed the government.
Whereas this gold plated winged goddess is called the Angel of Independence and celebrates Mexico's independence from Spain on September 16th 1810...

Many of the shady tree lined boulevards and parks are filled with weekend markets and it seems that most of the twenty million locals, along with the many tourists, are out looking for a bargain ...

The national museums, galleries and tourist sites, are free for Mexicans at the weekends, so there were long lines in some of the more popular places. Maybe things will be quieter by Monday and Tuesday.