Campeche: Mexico's best kept secret

For: Javier Brandoli (text and photos)
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Let's start with the basic message: if there is an amazing Mexican state I recommend visiting is Campeche. In travel journalism happens sometimes lead epithets and conclusions are delayed. In this text everything is already said. If you don't want to read more, it may even be recommended to do so for those who have food in the oven or half have a good book, just buy a plane ticket and visit Campeche. Sure they will thank me.

For the rest, those who voluntarily decided to continue reading, let's now go to the content on which to support the first sentence. Maybe, best, let's do a mathematical recount to show that my statement has something scientific about it.

Campeche is a stone tunnel from which you come out rejuvenated to a square, green grass, surrounded by Mayan ruins from which the shadows fled. Edzna is not an old pre-Hispanic city, It is something else that bothers me to have that precision of those of us who exercise the south: thirty iguanas, a jungle with six thousand three hundred four trees, eight hundred fourteen steps, two claps and six echoes, and a beehive converted into a temple where the lords of the past used to come to pay tribute. to all that wonder, when i took out my calculator, the result gave ten tourists. Can you imagine being able to see such a beautiful place with the feeling of having discovered it yourself??

A beehive converted into a temple where the lords of the past used to come to pay tribute

Campeche is cemetery, which I already talked about when i went there a year ago, where souls are buried on one side and bones on the other. The old Mayan pantheon of Pomuch, where one understands that someone wanted to make the dead of the Mayans a little less their dead to turn them into the dead of others, is a fascinating and strange verse. It may be one of the most enigmatic places you have seen in the whole world: a cemetery where the skeletal remains of the deceased are in boxes for all to see.

And when one is tempted to understand something macabre in that place, Mrs. Porfiria Maico arrives, and with her sweet gesture and her weak body, he begins to ask me with his language between Mayan and Spanish to remove the remains of his grandfather, or your aunt, that she keeps in wooden boxes wrapped in a cloth with care. So you understand that she does not see there the remains of a deceased loved one, see someone alive. and in between, Professor Hilario Tuz, He gives me an anthropological explanation of everything sitting on the skinny chairs in his house while we eat the famous Pomuch bread.

Campeche is also a beautiful colonial city. Mexico has some beautiful colonial cities like Taxco, Oaxaca, San Miguel de Allende, Zacatecas… but Campeche has something different. What is Francesca asks me as we walk happily through the historic center? And me, scientific, I renew my accounts now concentrating on not losing the thread to obtain a reliable result.

a wall brought from Castile and today threatened by pelicans, cormorants and seagulls

there are thirty, maybe eighty two, colorfully painted blocks of houses; many small churches with plenty of legends (my favorite is one that Ana told me in which she explained to me that they discovered that the walls made of gold dust were covered with lime to avoid the temptations of the times when pirates came to those waters to plunder everything); a library where at eight in the evening, with disturbing Swiss punctuality, they project a beautiful light show with the history of the city; a wall brought from Castile and today threatened by pelicans, cormorants and seagulls; several cobbled streets; an ocean with fishing boats and fifteen-year-olds who come to its confines to take their photos; several Andalusian patios bordering almost on the Caribbean and a pace of life so calm and slow that the clocks give the feeling that the hours are counting down. In fact, by medical recommendation of Rosa Delia, Gris's loving and cheerful mother who saw me a little older, when I looked at the calendar when I left the city I understood that I had nine days left. In his gesture of acquiescence we all perceived that it was a good thing but still insufficient.

It can be that?, I asked Francesca as I finished my recount sitting on a bench in the zócalo next to the old kiosk where life passes by. And she, more thoughtful, he only managed to point me out: "can be, but you forgot to add the food to the sea of ​​the Pigua, the detailed elaborations of the Convite event in which several chefs invented dishes; dinner on the balcony of Casa Vieja, where in the middle of a decoration that added three centuries you put a bite in the mouth of a fish and a city at the same time; the nights of the closed street 59; the tavern Salón Rincón Colonial with its folding doors, their old cabinets, its wooden bar and its colored walls; the coffees and chocolates of Chocol Ha in its new garden in the back and its old armchairs in the front, or the typical dishes of the Colonial Grill and its dimly lit dinners… And I wrote down and kept adding to testify that Campeche is one of my favorite places in Mexico. “Mathematics, they are mathematics, I kept repeating myself while updating my algorithms.

Campeche is also its people. And I especially remembered Humberto and Ana, two young professionals, gay, restless and educated, who were telling us about their land with the trust and distrust of the distant provinces. They share their life with generosity and without too much fanfare because they welcome travelers with manners from the homes of our elders: with wishes that you come and with fear that you will break the porcelain. Like the old grandmothers who prepared their dining rooms for people to see without spoiling anything. The danger of Campeche, your porcelain, is that it stops being what it is and becomes what the others are. Tourism did not change anything and left them, for the time being, be themselves. When you go to Campeche, remember to observe with military discipline the rule of not asking them to change anything.. I beg you not to go otherwise.

When you go to Campeche, remember to observe with military discipline the rule of not asking them to change anything.

I will tell an anecdote that they explained to us that perfectly sums up what I am talking about. In Campeche, playing the lottery or bingo is a tradition to which the city devotes itself with devotion. One walks and can see in the open houses the elderly people playing their binguito. It is so popular that each number is marked on the board with a drawing or figure and that has ended up replacing the metric system with which the rest of the world is governed.. “Our grandmothers, when they give their phone number to a friend, instead of saying the numbers, they say the lottery figures that everyone knows”, Ana and Humberto tell us. Ie, if your phone is 54 32 50 17, they tell the other woman: “Aim: campana, prickly pear, butterfly and chair. And they, in that folksy world that saves time and uses simplicity to untangle equations, understand that drawings are more accurate than figures.

And then they sit at the table Jorge, Gerardo, Walter and other friends of theirs who were involved in turning their office into an efficient playground, and a man sings in the square, and a lady sells sweets, and the day is closing, and the streets collapse, and we remember outside the walls as we walk to our rooms the whim of a distant day that we spent at the Hacienda Uayamón, an old Yucatecan hacienda converted into an exclusive retreat, and we ran into some quiet drunk whose day ended unexpectedly, and we chatted with Luis and Gris from that Mexico that they have in their veins and for which they feel the deep love of the first things, and we pack everything and leave with the desire to pretend to return doing subtraction with drawings.

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Comments (3)

  • Luis Gomez

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    I met Campeche two years ago, I spent two days coming from Chiapas, and I agree with what this text says so beautifully: It is a very interesting place and with hardly any tourists. We would have liked to stay more days, but it was a group trip and we went to Mérida and then to the beaches of Quintana Roo. With Palenque is what I liked most about that great trip.

    Answer

  • dunia barn

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    I only miss Calakmul and the oil zone of Ciudad del Carmen. At night it is impressive to see the flashes of fire from the platforms.

    Answer

  • Florence

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    I write it down now that in February we will make a trip around the Peninsula

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