If ever you are looking for a short hike through a beautiful landscape to a mirador with a great view, just head for San Juan Evangelista on the shores of La Laguna de Cajititlán.

An enterprising family has transformed Amatitán’s impressive Ruinas de Chimulco into a restaurant which is not only charming and picturesque, but, I’ll venture to say, unique, because its table-side pool is fed by a qanat, a kind of underground aqueduct which was invented in Persia 3,000 years ago.

Every year in August, my friend Franky Álvarez sends out a call: “I need 300 volunteers to plant 300 trees on top of el Cerro del Cuatro.”

 “My niece and her girlfriend plan to do the Camino a Santiago Compostela (800 kilometers) next month,” my neighbor Miguel Mayorga told me. “So my wife and I plan to take them up to La Chupinaya this Sunday to warm them up … do you want to come along?”

I recently spent a morning on the beach at Atotonilco Lagoon learning all about the plight of a tiny waterbird called the Snowy Plover.

Years ago, watercolorist Jorge Monroy took me to what he called a “river paradise” near the town of El Rosario in Nayarit, a two-hour drive from Guadalajara.