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Oaxaca's Historic Center:
Central North
Quieter than the Zócalo......
On the corner of Carranza, across García Vigil you come to the Church of El Carmen Alto, built around 1670 with funds provided by the generous Don Manuel Fernández Fiallo to house Carmelite friars. Its location has an interesting if debatable history. Supposedly in this very place was an Aztec temple to the goddess Centeotl, patroness of corn and fertility. The temple was razed by the Spaniards and a hermitage put in its place dedicated to the Santa Veracruz where travelers could find rest, medical attention, and even a decent burial. There is doubt in some quarters about the existence of any Aztec temple on this site for lack of specific evidence up to now, but the story makes a fine sequence. The present church, of course, took the place of the simple hermitage.
Just south of Carmen Alto Church, between Alcalá and García Vigil, a short block north of Santo Domingo Church is the Plazuela of Carmen Alto. Unlike the fancier plazas on Alcalá, this one belongs to the Indians. Here the Trique weavers and Zapotecs sell textiles and Teotitlán del Valle rugs, hanging out their goods under multicolored awnings. Every day their huipiles with the characteristic red, white and black horizontal stripes decorate the aisles of belts, shirts, shawls, and wall hangings being woven before your eyes on backstrap looms. Merchants from Mitla also sell a variety of blouses, shirts and huipiles. On the south side of the plaza are Cocijo handicrafts and Rembrandt photo supply. On the west is García Vigil Street with additional handicraft shops including Jade and Chimalli.
Just south of Santo Domingo Church is Gurron Street located between Alcalá and 5 de Mayo. Although not properly a park or plaza, this short stretch of luxurious palm trees and shops selling rugs (Magica Expresion) and textiles (CRESPO) with some tinware, pottery and jewelry, is a convenient oasis with refreshment and sweet stands. Pairs of sweethearts are always perched on the steps below the Dominican church, and shopkeepers gossip outside when low on customers. Mothers with children in tow, tourists and families emerging from the Regional Museum at Santo Domingo are lured by the street’s simple pleasures enhanced by a double row of electric pink bugambilias along the side of the church.
At the east end of Gurrión before it turns into Constitución is a tiny park, well-named: the Jardín del Pañuelito (Garden of the Little Handkerchief). Its jacaranda trees bloom azure-lavender in the spring, creating a lovely profile against the clouds and shading the park benches and Gecko Art Gallery complex, with Teotitlán rug shop on the corner, a coffee shop serving the patio and the Welty Institute for Oaxaca Studies Library at the back. Walking two blocks south on 5 de Mayo toward the Camino Real Hotel , you will encounter a group of attractive stores with jewelry, books, rugs, and other handicrafts, as well as Coffee Beans , Oaxaca’s best little coffee shop. Across from the Santo Domingo on Alcalá are other good stores: Oro de Monte Albán jewelry (its workshop on Gurrión is open to visitors), Las Siete Regiones specializing in textiles and IAGO, the Institutge of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca with its outstanding library, book shop, exhibition galleries, and a patio restaurant.
Up Alcalá, one block north of Carmen Alto Church, is a delightful narrow park with tall trees and benches but no commerce, a special place for a quiet rendezvous or those who like to walk a city, finding out its secrets. One block north and east of that is another little park called Jardín Conzatti complete with a fountain, benches and trees (palms, pines and “pirules”).
There is also a Carmen Bajo (Lower Church of El Carmen, at the corner of Morelos and Porfirio Díaz) as well as the Carmen Alto (Upper Church of El Carmen) and you may wonder why. A feasible explanation is location— Carmen Bajo is nearer the center of town on lower ground than Carmen Alto. However, there was another difference: Carmen Alto was attended by the Spanish colonists whereas Carmen Bajo ministered to Indians and mestizos.
Across the street from Carmen Alto is the small Museo de Juárez, at García Vigil No. 609, in a house arranged with mementos of Benito Juárez adult life and in the style of a dwelling of the 1800s. At the age of 13, Juárez left his village of San Pablo Guelatao and came to Oaxaca. Fortunately he found a patron and employer in the person of Don Antonio Salanueva, bookbinder, member of the Third Order of Franciscans, and owner of this house. A serious man oriented to humanitarian acts, as his connection with the Franciscan Order indicated, he saw to it that Juárez learned Spanish (he spoke only Zapotec) and went to school, eventually becoming the first lawyer to be graduated from the newly opened Institute of Science and Art.
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El Llano
Just north of the museum you can enjoy the sight of the picturesque aqueduct constructed in the 1700s to bring water to the city from the hilly area of San Felipe del Agua. Just a few blocks west is the Paseo Juárez or El Llano Park. It’s located 6 blocks north, and 1 block west of the Zócalo (a five minute taxi ride from the Zócalo or five-minute walk from Santo Domingo Church).
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Dedicated to Oaxaca’s great Zapotec Indian President Benito Juárez (note his statue on a pyramid-like base with pre-Colombian motifs, surrounded by gold urns), El Llano Park merits discovery by visitors. Quieter than the Zócalo, it is much loved and enjoyed by Oaxaca natives. Something is always going on: parties for children, book fairs, color guards practicing for a school parade, gymnasts flipping on mats, maids gossiping, joggers circling and couples flirting on the park benches, the fountains and on roller blades. Indeed, the park is the place for sweethearts; on Fridays during Lent, university students hand out flowers to their favorites, and the pretty girls with the most blossoms become the Beauty Queens.
Calm and Aristocratic
The pedestrian section of Alcalá street doesn’t begin for yet another block at Morelos. Crossing Morelos you are now on the wide, calm, walking part of the street, aristocratic with its stone paving and the elegantly severe old stone buildings, softened by their handsome wrought iron railings, that line the way to the great church and convent of Dominicans, Santo Domingo de Oaxaca. Leading up to it are the Contemporary Art Museum of Oaxaca (MACO), many colonial houses, restaurants, and some of the most distinguished shops and galleries.
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The building on the northwest corner of Alcalá and Morelos has, like so many others in Oaxaca, served many roles, and was redone in this century. It now houses a small version of a useful institution found all over the world, the Nacional Monte de Piedad or National Pawnshop. This organization, which has its humanitarian side, was started in the late 1700s with the splendiferous title of Sacro y Real Monte de Piedad de Animas, taking its model from medieval Europe and more directly from Spain earlier in the same century. At first nothing was charged for the loans made on people’s possessions but when they redeemed their things, they were to give alms for the souls («ánimas) in purgatory. It is said that some proportion of the fees charged is still devoted to charity.
On the corner to the right, at Alcalá No. 200 is the sizable Bibliotech Pœblica (Public Library) distributed around a rectangular patio replete with delicate columns and arches giving a vaguely Arabic effect. The view through the entrance door of slender white columns and narrow arches set off by the attractive garden planting of the patio entices one to step in and look around the different rooms dedicated to periodicals, children’s literature, etc.
Patio, Contemporary Art Museum of Oaxaca |
Just past the library you must go to the other side of the street so you can view at some distance the beautiful baroque doorway of the so-called Casa de Cortés at Alcalá No. 202. The typical 18th-century decoration around the doorway of the house and above, is here heavier and richer than on other buildings. There is the characteristic wrought iron balcony over the entrance, pairs of columns flanking door and window above, coats of arms of the families of the house and in the shell roofed niche in between the coats of arms, and archangel, Raphael. If you consider that Cortés belonged to the 1500s and the house dates probably from the 1700s you will see that the name, while full of romantic implications, is a real misnomer. And in fact, the facade of the house is sufficiently distinguished to attract attention without needing any connection with the famous.
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Centro Cultural Ricardo Flores Magñn at Alcalá No. 302 regularly presents a varied cultural program with films and live events. It’s worth checking on what they have going on during your visit.
At No. 305 there is an institution to rescue bookworms, who only read in English and have run out of material to read. La Biblioteca Circulante de Oaxaca. The Oaxaca Lending Library offers a sizable selection of publications in English to be read there or taken out upon depositing a fee which you can collect on returning same.
Passing the modest Church of La Sangre de Cristo, you may want to take a look around the Palacio Santo Domingo, a small but perfectly modern mall in a revamped old building. Oaxaca Tours’ office is located here on the second floor.
Back on Independencia street, the solemn building (one block east of the department of tourism, across from the cathedral, on the corner of Alcalá) at present houses part of the University of Oaxaca. It takes up a good part of the block and if you are interested in getting a feeling for young Oaxacans who are ambitious and lucky enough to have entered on university level education, take a turn through the teeming patios of the dignified old building.
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Extravagantly Gorgeous
Just ahead on Alcalá you are going to have the privilege of visiting one of the great monastery-church compounds of México, the splendid Church and ex-Convent of Santo Domingo, seat of the Dominican order in Oaxaca since the 16th century and now the only residence out of the more than 40 that existed originally. Aldous Huxley called it “one of the most extravagantly gorgeous churches in the world”. The dignified exterior leads one to expect something similar inside but you can only gasp at the incredible sight of the whole interior of the church covered in gleaming decoration.
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Construction was begun in the mid-1500s; it was occupied by friars in 1608 though not finished, and terminated around 1670, except for the Chapel of the Rosary added in the early 1700s. In the turbulent times of strife after the properties were removed from church jurisdiction the convent was turned into a barracks and horses were stabled in the church— death knell for the beautiful original interior of Santo Domingo. Altars were scraped and burned for their gold leaf, a pittance of gain in comparison with the artistic treasure destroyed. However, by the end of the 1800s the compound was returned to the secular clergy.
The northernmost part of the property, directly to the left of the church extends the ex-convent which has housed the Regional Museum of Oaxaca since 1972. This is a must visit partly because of the stately building itself, the grand two-story cloister with its monumental stairway to the second floor with somewhat fragmented but still grandiose early fresco work on walls and the vault of the stairwell. And also because the museum contains essential information for the visitor to obtain some grasp of the important pre-Hispanic past of the region as well as providing a chance to see a selection of the gold jewelry found in archaeological sites in the State of Oaxaca; most notably the rich trove found by archaeologist Alfonso Caso in Tomb 7 of Monte Albán.
Oaxaca is the center of a state brimming with attractions concentrated in its capital, around the Zócalo, its magical main square. A square that was designed to let life be lived and to be open to the world, with no more effort than by the choice of a good seat at a fair and balanced distance from the Palace of the Government and the Cathedral.
We hope that this brief overview of the historic district of Oaxaca has given you impetus to discover more on your own in a city that has so much to offer.
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ZOCALO: main square
