Once again I had the pleasure of spending a day exploring the wonders of Western Mexico with students from the Waldorf School de Guadalajara. This time, the destination was La Toma Balneario where several room-temperature, spring-fed waterfalls cascade into swimming pools overlooking the deep, picturesque canyon alongside the town of Tequila.
This gorgeous site is a mere hour’s drive from Guadalajara, so we added to our itinerary a visit to Tres Mujeres Tequila Distillery, conveniently located alongside the “libre” highway to Tequila and Nogales.
Five hundred meters before the distillery, there’s a little mirador on the left (west) side of the road offering you a perfect perspective for viewing the Tequila Volcano looming overhead, surrounded by a blue-green “sea” of agaves tequilana weber. Signs in Spanish and English describe the volcano and its history.
Next we pulled into Tres Mujeres where we were lucky enough catch Don Rafael, a now retired jimador who knows absolutely everything about tequila-making and immediately offered to share his knowledge with the eleven inquisitive young minds I was accompanying.
“Just what is a jimador?” you may be asking and so were the kids.
“Follow me,” said Don Rafael, as he picked up a tool with a long handle, greatly resembling the kind of chopper I used to use years ago to remove ice from the sidewalk of my childhood home in midwinter Milwaukee.
“This is a coa,” he told us, “and it is as sharp as the finest meat cleaver.”
I would have been happy with a quick demo of how to use this instrument, but to our delight Don Rafa led us off into an agave field, determined to show us the whole process of harvesting these prickly plants. Soon he found one ready for harvesting. Then, with his razor-sharp coa, he removed the pencas (leaves) with ease, leaving only the bola de mezcal or piña. The pencas, he explained, are bitter and produce no sugar, so they must be completely removed.
Now he split the piña in two in order to give us a taste of the white fiber inside, which we were all surprised to find is edible. One of the children, Karime Mora, later commented: “The bola de mezcal tastes like dried-out jicama and leaves a sensation in your mouth something like that of pineapple. It’s tough, but you could eat it to keep from starvation.”
Cooked, of course, it tastes totally different, as we found out a little later. “When the agave comes out of the oven,” says Jimena Berny, “it tastes very sweet and its color is changed to brown. The heat changes the starch in the bola to sugar.” These sweet fibers must have been quite a treat for people living in the centuries before refined sugar.
One thing I like about Tres Mujeres is that you can wander about on your own, spending as much time as you like watching each step of the tequila-making process: cooking the piñas in a huge oven, crushing the sweet mezcal, fermenting and distilling.
I had thought that was all there was to see and was about to leave, when a worker came up to me and said, “But you haven’t visited our cava, where the tequila is aged. Just go down that ramp.”
When the children discovered they were about to enter a big dark tunnel, they were ecstatic and once inside I was amazed how extensive this long underground passage was and how many barrels of tequila lined the walls. Eventually we returned to the surface at another part of the grounds and learned that we had just walked through the world’s largest tequila cava (winecellar) holding more than 1,000 barrels.
Next we drove to Amatitán and another nine kilometers further north to a belvedere overlooking Santa Rosa Canyon, carved over the millennia by the ubiquitous Santiago River. I had planned for us to drive down to the bottom of the canyon so we could take a sample of the river water for analysis, but one of the parents on the trip, warned me off. “They’ve done new studies of the river water at ITESO and discovered it’s not only toxic and carcinogenic, it’s also radioactive.”
Recalling ten-year-old Miguel Angel López, who fell into the river a few years ago and allegedly died from exposure to the toxic “water,” we canceled this project instantly. Apparently environmentalists now plan to attack the factories polluting the river on health-hazard grounds rather than for breaking Mexico’s “strict” pollution laws which seem to have no teeth.
About 15 minutes later, we passed the town of Tequila and turned off the highway toward Balneario La Toma. Here they have recently built a great mirador where you can admire the panoramic view of another enormous, deep canyon carved by the Santiago and filled with fields of agaves and tropical orchards.
La Toma Balneario started out as a single pool beneath a picturesque waterfall. It was so popular that now there are at least six pools and when all of them are filled with kids – as happens every weekend – it’s a pretty wild place. But go there on a weekday, as we did, and it’s quiet enough for meditating or writing your memoirs … and the view is stupendous. As for the water temperature, Daniela King commented, “The water isn’t cold if you keep moving, but stop moving and you will definitely feel cold.” We went there on a cloudy day in March, but on a nice hot day it’s deliciously refreshing.
During my ride back to Guadalajara, the children of the Waldorf school began to sing and I swear they rival many a famous choir. They sang in English, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese and other languages I don’t know, each song in three or four-part harmony. If they were to make a CD, I think they could finance lots of future trips to the wonderful sites around Guadalajara. I wish more schools would take their kids to see the outdoor wonders of what I call “The Magic Circle” around this city, because learning doesn’t just come from books.
A visit to Tres Mujeres Tequila is free. La Toma Balneario charges 60 pesos for kids and adults over eight.
How to get there
To reach Tres Mujeres, drive west out of Guadalajara toward Nogales, following “libre” Highway 15 for 33 kilometers towards Amatitán. You’ll find the distillery on your right, about two kilometers after El Arenal (and about five before Amatitán). If you’d like to visit La Toma, continue along the “libre” to the town of Tequila and keep going. About three minutes later (2.5 kilometers after the Tequila Pemex station) turn right at the Balneario sign and drive 1.6 kilometers down the cobblestone road to La Toma. Driving time from Guadalajara to Tres Mujeres is about half an hour and to La Toma it’s just over one hour.