Columns

My friend Jorge Monroy, one of Mexico’s best-known watercolorists, grew up in the town of Ejutla, located about 100 kilometers southwest of Guadalajara. “In the area,” he told me, “there’s a small mountain called El Narigón, The Big Nose, on top of which they have found a great many beautiful rocks.

Teenager Juan Manuel Salazar lives in the town of Ocoyoacac in the State of México, not far from the famed Nevado de Toluca, the country’s fourth highest volcano. When his 15th birthday approached, his parents asked him what he’d like for a present.

The Palace of the Cows is one of Guadalajara’s most venerable old mansions. It was closed to the public for some time but now it’s accepting visitors again.

Last week I attended a seminar called Hemp & Learn in Ajijic. I was persuaded to go by Juan Álvaro Cortés, who, it seems, runs a Guadalajara  belt-manufacturing company on weekdays and spends his weekends transforming the lives of epileptic children through the Fundación Mexicana de Cannabis Medicinal, a non-profit that advises parents of children with epilepsy.

In previous articles I have mentioned Bakpak, an excellent magazine for hikers and campers published in Mexico, which costs nothing and is full of information about the great outdoors (but entirely in Spanish).

In addition to publishing a magazine, the Bakpak team organizes excursions for people living in and around Monterrey and Guadalajara. Recently, they told me their new season of activities for 2020 would start with a hike in La Huasteca, an area just outside Monterrey filled with limestone mountains, many of which are long, thin and high, running in parallel lines like giant knife blades. Cañon la Huasteca, they told me, is actually the beginning of the Sierra Madre Oriental, which extends south for 1,000 kilometers.

World Wetlands Day has come again, this time with a special significance for the people of Teuchitlán, because February 2 marked the tenth anniversary of the acceptance of Presa la Vega as a Ramsar site, “a wetland of international importance.”