Mexico is famous for many things, one of which is coffee, but our attentive yet almost incomprehensible (face masks, accents, rápido speech) young waiters at breakfast have obviously missed the memo. They bring us excellent chapulines – tortillas in salsa rojo, with huevos revueltos on top – but the coffee they serve is dire. When we describe it later to Galo, our very personable guide in Puebla, he tells us there is a phrase for bad coffee; agua de calcetines, or the water from washing your socks. And he’s bang on. It was that bad!
So Galo’s task this morning, when we meet up with him in the lobby, is to find us some good coffee. There’s a Starbucks opposite the hotel but we want something authentic. Before we can get our caffeine hit though, Galo has some history for us, via a model of the colonial city which sits outside the Palacio Municipal in the main square.
Puebla sits at a critical juncture in a valley in the heart of Mexico. First developed by the Spanish, it became a vastly wealthy and cosmopolitan melting pot of European, Asian and indigenous cultures as it formed a staging post between Acapulco on the Pacific Coast and Veracruz on the Caribbean coast. So before the construction of the Panama Canal the Spanish would ship people and goods from their colonies in the Philippines to Acapulco, and then transport them overland via Mexico City and Puebla to Veracruz and then sail back to Spain. This avoided months of navigating around the entire South American landmass, in particular the treacherous Straits of Magellan in Tierra Del Fuego.
Puebla was the first planned colonial city in the Americas and laid out on a grid structure, with beautiful buildings, including the Cathedral and the Palacio Municipal, which is a newer construction by a British architect from 1906. Next to the palace is a rather fine art gallery which has some intriguing displays including a ceramic chess set representing King Maximilian and Queen Charlotte and their royal army opposing Benito Juarez and his revolutionary forces. And ceramics are one of Puebla’s finest exports, with their world famous blue and white Talavera tiles and huge amounts of pottery for sale everywhere.
We continue into the stunning cathedral and then on to the Biblioteca Palafoxian, the first public library in the Americas, opened in 1646 when Bishop Juan de Palafox y Menoza decided his mission was to gather literature from around the world and encourage (certain parts of) the population to learn to read. It contains over 50,000 antique books including some of the rarest texts in existence and Galo claims it’s the third most important library in the world after the British Library and the Ashmolean. It has a definite Oxford / Hogwarts vibe to it.
With Coman in particular now flagging, we stop for our much longer-for coffee beside the Zocalo, before heading to a small local restaurant for lunch. It’s called Antojitos Tomy Matrix and we watch the women frying up the dishes in front of us. And boy, do they fry. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten such a greasy meal. We have molote huitlacoche, which are deep-fried tortillas containing a mushroom-like fungus which lives on sweetcorn husks, and then oil-drenched quesadillas with squash blossom, stringy white cheese and the herb epacote. Envuelto de mole is next, cheese tortillas in chocolate-y mole poblano and we drink it down with agua de horchata, delicious rice milk with cinnamon.
While talking about the food Galo asks us if we’ve ever heard of a British chef called Rick Stein. We say yes, of course, and he reveals that he was the fixer for the Puebla segment of Rick’s show ‘The Road To Mexico’ and really loved meeting him and the crew but that he’d never had the opportunity to watch the show. By wonderful coincidence I happen to have, via iPlayer on my phone, the episodes of that series relating to our travels and so get to show Galo the clips he was involved in, including the segment that took over 40 takes to get right of filming Rick trying, and failing dismally, to make tortillas.
It’s really quite moving as Galo starts to cry in the restaurant, overwhelmed and unable to believe that he finally gets to see the show after all these years. Apparently the impact of the series on towns all over Mexico, especially Puebla and Oaxaca, has meant a huge increase in English speaking tourists from around the globe exploring Mexico for the first time, something our guide in Oaxaca confirms a couple of days later.
Galo’s joy obviously requires celebration so a couple of doors down is a cute little bar called La Pasita, which has been run by the same family for generations and serves pasita (grape liquor) in a dizzying variety of combinations. Coman has the straight-forward pasita, I have a coffee-flavoured one and Galo orders a multi-coloured mariachi. They’re rather fine, and the conversation is flowing, so Galo orders a second round. I have an antiodoto which is orange and guava flavoured, Coman goes for the amontillado de naranja (orange) and Galo orders a China Poblana.
We’re intrigued by the name of his drink, so he gives us the full background. China Poblana was a famous woman in Puebla in the 17th century, whose influence and imagery has, despite all attempts to the contrary, spread across the whole of Mexico and even informed the world’s view of Mexican women. She was originally born in Delhi in 1602 and named Mira but was kidnapped by pirates and taken to the Philippines where she was baptized and given the name Catharina de San Juan. From there she was trafficked to Acapulco and brought to Puebla by slave traders but was bought by a compassionate trader, Captain Hipolito del Castillo, who integrated her into his family as a nanny for his children and home-help for his wife.
She became very religious and started having visions of saints, angels, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, but also helped heal people using ayurvedic practices and created clothes with designs influenced by the Indian sub-continent. When Catharina de San Juan died aged 86 the locals started worshipping her as a saint, but the Inquisition refused to accept a person of colour as a saint and ordered that every depiction of her was destroyed and even the mention of her name was banned for centuries.
So locals referred to her as China Poblana, meaning an Asian woman of Puebla, and the designs of her clothes have become the typical Mexican dress that people abroad think of when they depict Mexican women. The Inquisition’s prohibition ended up turning her into a iconic image across the world, even though we’ve not heard of her name. And bizarrely, when we later walk past the house she lived and died, La Casa De China Poblana, and read the plaque dedicated to her, it transpires the anniversary of her death is actually 425 year ago today – January 5th.
No such plaque however exists for the house on the corner by La Pasita, which Galo tells us was lived in by a chap called Martín de Villavicencio Salazar, a contemporary of China Poblana. He also entered local folklore history as he was an impostor priest, and Robin Hood-style bandit, who repeatedly managed to escape from detention by the authorities and church.
A fictional account of his life was written 100 years later by the politician and novelist Vicente Riva Palacio who re-named him ‘Martin Garatuza’, and called him El Zorro, ‘the fox’. Elements of Garatuza’s life, and his nickname, passed into the myth of the 20th century swashbuckling creation Zorro, who was a combination of various Hispanic heroes. And so we get a photo outside ‘Zorro’s house’… albeit one that has never been given the credit.
We walk on to La Casa de Alfeñique, a house decorated on the outside with white lines that are reminiscent of the decoration on the sweets made with sugar and almonds, called alfeñiques. Apparently a young nobleman in Puebla was tasked with creating a house made of candy to win the hand of his true love, and this was the result. It’s now a museum about the history of the city and was badly damaged in the massive 2017 earthquake, but has been lovingly restored to its former glories.
Once we’ve completed our tour of the museum Galo takes his leave of us and we walk around El Parrian market, and through the increasingly busy backstreets of Puebla’s colonial district as dusk falls and locals start shopping for food. We wander into the Capella de Rosario, which has incredible baroque stucco work, very similar to the church in Tonantzintla we saw yesterday, before ending our day with dinner at a pizzeria near our hotel called Arugula, where Coman reveals newfound artistic skills by copying the painting on the wall with the crayons left for children to doodle.
Obviously Puebla’s highly decorated churches have inspired his own inner Diego Rivera tendencies. Considering our next stop of Oaxaca is meant to be even more beautiful than Puebla, he’ll be painting huge murals next!!
