Oaxaca is a fantastic city, lots of energy, amazing indigenous crafts and arts scene, beautiful architecture, cathedrals, churches, colourful painted houses and cobbled streets. Oaxaca (pronounced Wah-ha-ca) is one of my favourite cities in the world.
Wandering in to some of the big hotels which have been renovated from 15th century monasteries, prisons, old haciendas etc reveal some stunning inner garden courtyards and amazing balconied walkways and huge stone paving slabs.
The walls of many of these buildings are incredibly thick which cools the building in the hot weather. Would love to live in one of these places! There’s quite a large community of ex-pats here, mainly Europeans and Americans…the downside is that them being here has really pushed up the prices.
The streets are really colourful and we have been visiting the 3 large markets – all indoors and in the town centre; done a fair bit of shopping and bartering and browsed in some lovely book shops like ‘Amate’ which holds a fantastic stock of English and other language fiction as well as a great selection of Mexican photography books and fictional and historical accounts of life in Mexico. Whoever buys stock for that place has a great eye – I could spend hours in there
Women from the Chiapas region come to Oaxaca city to sell; they are recognised by their traditional dress, slighter build – slim and quite short, usually long hair plaited with colourful ribbons and more Indian looking facial features.
The Travel Diarist 