Columns

In 2019, a group of ladies in the Jalisco country town of Etzatlán crocheted their way to world fame and set a Guinness record.

Recently, the city of Guadalajara asked them to celebrate the World Cup with new derivations of what Guinness referred to as a “crochet craft pavilion,” but which the ladies call a “Cielo Tejido” (Woven Sky): a 2,800-square-meter canopy of hand-crocheted hexagons made of weather-resistant raffia, itself made from recycled plastic bottles.

Long ago, I reached the point where I could carry on a conversation in Spanish about practically any topic — a sign, I thought, that I’d mastered the language. I’ve spent years living in a Mexican community with very few foreigners, and my wife happens to be a first-rate Spanish teacher who never lets me forget cuando metí la pata (when I made a blooper).

In 1965, a handful of college students in Austin, Texas, asked their geology professor a simple question: Where would you look if you wanted to find the deepest cave in North America?

On April 7, 2026, a 42-year-old miner named Francisco Zapata was discovered alive after being trapped for 14 days at the far end of a three-kilometer-long tunnel full of sludge and water, 300 meters below the surface.

For over 400 years, English sailor David Ingram’s account of his trek from Mexico to Canada was considered either fanciful or phony by historians.

Matteo Volpi is a project leader for Senderos y Caminos de México A.C., which was founded in Ajijic in 2014 to help people find their way along Mexico’s vast network of rural trails, and also to rescue, rehabilitate and preserve these ancient footpaths, some of which were in use long before the arrival of the Conquistadores.