Recently Guadalajara’s Museo de la Ciudad, located downtown, asked Susy and me to do a presentation of our new bilingual book, Outdoors in Western Mexico, Volume Two, and to follow up the talk with a hike to one of the many natural beauty spots I’ve been writing about in the Reporter over the last thirty years.
Now it seems the Museum has been holding “Rondas” or walking tours to points of interest in the city for several years, but, according to Museum Director Mónica del Arenal, “Never have we done a Ronda outside the city.” Since the number of people who came to our talk was around 50, I figured we’d be lucky if even half of them turn up for Ronda XXVI, a three-kilometer hike to Hidden Spring, in the woods adjacent to Pinar de la Venta.
Well, I vastly underestimated the power of Facebook. It seems the poster advertising Ronda XXVI got shared more than once, and last Sunday, January 25, I gasped in surprise at an apparently endless assemblage of vehicles lined up along the cobblestone streets inside the entrance to Pinar. I thought somebody in the neighborhood must be organizing a major event, but the multitude of souls climbing out of the cars all told me the same thing: “We’ve come for the caminata!”
¡Caray! A record 255 people had shown up, all anxious to breathe fresh country air and to taste “the world’s most delicious water” at the Hidden Spring. With the help of several kind volunteers, we managed to get all those happy hikers to the spring and back and somehow I even found time to tell them about the enormous explosion that created the Primavera Caldera 95,000 years ago, and spewed volcanic ash and rock (jal) over a huge area known today as Jalisco.
Present among the 255 caminantes was Mónica del Arenal, who told me the story of the Museum’s Rondas program while we were waiting for the last individuals to exit the narrow, pumice-walled canyon where we all had been hiking.
Mónica, I discovered, began her studies of architecture at ITESO in Guadalajara and went on to study in Barcelona, London and Rome. As for the Rondas, she told me they started in 2007, before she was Director, “as a series of walks people could take to get to know the city and its architectural patrimony.”
She explained that the target areas for these walks were Guadalajara, Tlaquepaque, Zapopan and Tonalá and that the interpretive routes dealt with architectural styles and chronology or were focused on the work of particular individuals.
“The idea,” continued del Arenal, “is to make it easy for anyone to follow one of these routes on their own. You don’t have to be an expert in art history or a student of architecture. I saw there was a real need to make it easy for ordinary people to know their own city. In time we added another theme: parks, gardens and plazas. At a later stage we decided to install bronze plaques to identify these sites. We ended up placing 750 of these plaques in greater Guadalajara.”
Del Arenal said the walks or Rondas normally began at the Museum and might include quite a number of themes, such as the fincas built by Luis Barragán, the architecture of the Porfiriato, the gardens of the city, or religious architecture. “We did quite a number of these Rondas before we started numbering them,” added the Museum Director. “This visit to the Hidden Spring is officially, number 26, but actually it’s the 35th such route we’ve offered over the years—and we’ve never repeated any of them!”
To make it easy for people to visit these sites on their own, the Museum has printed seven maps showing points of interest within a designated area. They might introduce you to the Colonias of the city, guide you to the creations of Luis Barragán or introduce you to the city’s markets. The maps are free of charge and can be picked up the Museum.
“Although the maps are designed for self-guided tours,” says del Arenal, “we always recommend doing the walks with a guide. All you have to do is get a group together and the City Museum will find you a guide, but only for Saturdays and Sundays.”
Mónica del Arenal says the next Ronda will also be outside the city, to the small town of Ahuisculco, located 33 kilometers southwest of the city. “This will be part of a series of conferences on Nature and Archaeology and our guide will be archaeologist Rodrigo Esparza. For this one we plan to rent a van or bus, so there will be a transportation fee, but in general, we try as much as possible to make these outings free of charge.” The date for this outing has yet to be set.
Museo de la Ciudad is located downtown at Calle Independencia 684 at the corner of. Mariano Barcena. Tel: 01 33 1201 8712. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on weekends. The entrance fee is 20 pesos, free for seniors. As for the books “Outdoors in Western Mexico,” volumes one and two, they are available in Guadalajara from Sandi books and in Ajijiic from Diane Pearl Colecciones and Sol Mexicano Gallery.