Stop at one of the half-dozen sidewalk cafes fronting Oaxaca`s shady main square-or zocalo-and chances are you`ll buy more than a 50-cent coffee.
Black-haired Indian children scurry table to table, selling everything from gardenia nosegays to intricate weavings. Girls, often barefoot beneath heavy woolen skirts, offer bunches of pink roses; raggedy boys hawk bark paintings or offer shoeshines.
Their parents work the area as well: Straw-hatted men lug bulky rugs;
women, their babies peeking from shawls, balance baskets of pottery or embroidered goods.
This movable feast of some of Mexico`s finest handicrafts appeals even to the weariest of shoppers, to the most jaded of travelers. Further, shopping from a restaurant table isn`t likely to add up to more than a fistful of pesos; it would be hard to spend more than that anywhere in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca.
These bargains are largely the result of the drastic decline of the Mexican peso in the last few years, but Oaxaca has always been a good value. The region, dependent on small-scale agriculture and heavily populated by Indians, has never entered the mainstream of Mexico`s economic and tourist development.
Another bonus for the visitor: Hotel and restaurant prices are not nearly as steep as they are in Mexico`s Pacific coast resorts. Hotel rooms, except for the deluxe Presidente, rarely exceed $45 a night: dinners, about $12 a couple.
Still, north-of-the-border tourists are not all that common: It`s the French and Germans who arrive by the busload. But with a Club Med in place and a Sheraton poised to open at the Huatulco beach development, 20 minutes away by air, North Americans as well will add this colonial outpost to their vacation itinerary.
Many sun-seekers may tack on a day for Oaxaca, but if vast Indian markets, distinctive handicrafts, or incomparable pre-Colombian ruins are of even passing interest, 24 hours would only whet one`s appetite.
The ”official” city sights-Santo Domingo Church, the Regional Museum, and Benito Juarez Market-can`t begin to compete with the inherent charm of Oaxaca, with its year-round spring climate, scores of bell-ringing churches, shady laurel trees and spontaneous street markets. Effortlessly, the visitor adopts the local custom of centering excursions around the zocalo. Mornings might begin with a $1 breakfast of eggs and coffee from a table at the Del Jardin cafe fronting the square. At eleven, it`s time for an espresso; by late afternoon, it seems everyone in town convenes for a free concert at the central bandstand.
From the square, a street leads six blocks to Santo Domingo, one of the finest legacies of 16th-Century Spanish rule. Craft and jewelry shops line the way, as well as a monastery on whose stone walls hang rows of embroidered shifts, blouses and woven rugs. Beneath this rainbow, women weave from primitive waist looms, their yarns spread on the sidewalk.
Next door to Santo Domingo, the regional museum gives an outstanding overview of the cultural diversity of the state.
The $10 Friday Indian market tour, with pickups at all major hotels, is an unparalled shopping excursion to the past. First stop is San Bartolo Coyotepec, where women fashion world-famous shiny black pottery totally by hand (a fruit bowl, vase and decorative turtle come to $7); at Santo Tomas Jalietza, girls as young as 7 work at looms, weaving napkins, table runners and belts; final stop is Ocotlan`s outdoor market, perhaps Mexico`s most traditional.
To reach Ocotlan, many families walk for days from remote villages to sell a hemp-tied bundle of goat cheese or a basket of potatoes. Women bent with age shuffle home with a couple of pieces of wood to be split and used for the week`s fuel.
But alongside the poverty is the beauty of the mounds of green and red chilies, meticulously stacked tomatoes and onions, braided garlic bulbs, bins of baked rolls and aisles of flowers. Behind the produce, in the tourist section, hundreds of hand-woven Zapotec rugs hang from stretched wires or are stacked high.
Markets such as Ocotlan date back centuries, although the large Indian ceremonial and population centers have long ago been abandoned or destroyed. The two most-visited are Mitla and Monte Alban.
When Cortez`s march reached Oaxaca in 1521, soldiers destroyed the important thousand-year-old Zapotec settlement called Mitla in two days, forcing Indian slaves to erect thick-walled churches with the rubble. What wasn`t destroyed remains as one of the finest examples of stone mosaics in the world.
Fortunately, the conquerors marched right by Monte Alban, an enormous ceremonial center on a hill above Oaxaca. There, taking more than a millennium, Zapotec builders actually flattened a mountain to contain a city that once covered 15 square miles.
A two-hour walk through Monte Alban encompasses 3,000 years of history. But that`s hardly astonishing in an area where Indians speak 60 separate idioms and live very much as they have since their ancestors helped build the grand plazas of this ancient site.
Indeed, the dim reaches of history seem not too far removed in Oaxaca, a city that gracefully lingers in its past.
