“You’re going to love hiking with Don Pepe,” said my friend Susan Street. “He’s a school teacher in Ixcatan, but also one of the most knowledgeable persons I’ve ever met about flora, fauna and the environment.”
Susan had arranged for Don Jose Casillas to lead a small group along a footpath which, in pre-Hispanic times, connected this settlement to the Pacific Coast.
San Francisco Ixcatan is located 15 kilometers due north of Guadalajara in the Barranca del Rio Santiago. The name Ixcatan, I learned, comes from ixcatl, cotton and tlan, meaning place. We met in the town plaza, in front of a little old church whose foundation, said Don Pepe, had been laid in 1590. “But the path we’ll be walking on is much older. There is very good documentation showing that it was once part of a very long trail leading all the way to Santa Fe, California and right here was a very strategic point because below us is the spot where pre-Hispanic people used to ford the Santiago River.”
Don Pepe added that Tecuexes and four other tribes inhabited this area and for 20 years they had resisted the Spaniards until huge numbers of them were finally massacred during the Mixton War (1540-1542).
As if to demonstrate that the people of Ixcatan never quite got over that defeat, Don Pepe led us to the local school where a very impressive mural is being painted on one of its walls, depicting exactly this battle.
“We’ll be inaugurating it during our annual Fiesta de los Tastoanes,” announced Pepe, “This begins at 6 p.m. on Friday, July 24 and goes on until 9 p.m. on Monday, July 27. The fiesta celebrates the victory (even though they actually lost) of the indigenous people over the Spaniards and the intervention of Santo Santiago (St. James the Apostle) who we believe brought an end to the massacre. There will be food, music by our own drummers and a dance re-enacting the battle. Everyone is invited.”
From the school we walked into a lush green field with clouds of steam still rising from high hills in the distance. “That’s a cuachalalate tree,” said Don Pepe, pointing. “It’s bark makes a tea famous for settling upset stomachs, and here is a guaje, whose seeds formed an important part of the pre-Hispanic diet and are still an important food source in our town.”
“And these agave-like plants are called cacuistle. Their spikes give us fiber for making ropes and they produce an edible fruit. Unlike agaves, they enrich the soil instead of depleting it.”
Every few steps, we came upon trees with edible leaves, which we were all soon chewing. For me, the most delicious was the leaf of the ciruelo (Mexican plum tree), which, I was surprised to discover, tastes very much like the fruit itself.
Every once in a while Don Pepe called our attention to the altitude. The town is at 1,100 meters and we were walking downhill toward the river, which is at 900 meters above sea level. It seemed like every 50-meter change of elevation brought different plants, animals and insects.
For a long time, we were “making our own trail” but then we came to a narrow path lined with large rocks on both sides. We were now on the pre-Hispanic Road which once was paved and may go all the way back to the 11th century when a lot of people migrated to this area above the Santiago. “Our church was built from cantera rock, which comes from right here,” Pepe told us.
At the bottom of the hill, we sampled delicious mangos barranqueños and then we arrived at the banks of the Santiago River and everything changed. We literally stepped out of a luxurious green jungle into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. The air smelled fetid and the shore was bare of life.
“I remember fishing in the Santiago 50 years ago,” said Pepe. “There was no pollution – it was beautiful here. Now there are 1,090 contaminants in the water. The worst, heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead, can’t be removed by treatment plants because the cost is too high. This river brings death and everything around it is dead. This ecosystem is dead.”
I asked why the polluting factories can’t be shut down, since Mexico has some of the toughest environmental protection laws in the world. Everyone in the group looked at me as if wondering how I could be so naïve.
“Those factories are owned by the families that own Mexico,” they told me, and that seemed to be the final word on the subject.
All along the river there are beautiful, enormous ahuehuetes (Montezuma cypresses) which have been there for centuries, but now they are dying. The stench of the river is tolerable right now, only because the river is swollen with water from the rainy season, said Pepe, adding that the very vapors that rise from the river in the dry season drive the animals uphill where they come into contact with townspeople, resulting in all sorts of problems.
But our hike didn’t end on this sad note. We piled into a pickup truck which Pepe thoughtfully provided and rode back up to his home in Ixcatan, where the townspeople had prepared a meal for us consisting of their specialties. We feasted on chicken, rice, beans, nopales, home-made tortillas and exquisite agua de guanabana (soursop juice) and jamaica (hibiscus flower juice) – all truly delicious and all hand-grown and hand-picked from the family’s permaculture garden, which we toured after the meal. I left there with my hands full of Aloe vera roots and the seeds of the moringa tree, whose leaves, I learned are considered a superfood, containing lots of protein, vitamins, minerals and amino acids – and they have a nice, spicy taste like arugula.
Don Pepe Casillas conducts tours like this for no charge, unless people would like a meal included (cost: 40 pesos per person). He can be reached by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or via “San Francisco Ixcatan en Pueblos de la Barranca del Rio Santiago” on Facebook.
Pepe also offers walks to other interesting places near Ixcatan, such as La Piedra Grande, an archaeological site with 46 Neolithic pictographs and La Cofradia, located one kilometer from town and featuring a 15-meter-high pyramid.
I’m not including any routes in this article because, in my opinion, the greatest attraction of hiking around Ixcatan is Don Pepe himself and no matter where you go with him, I’m sure you will have a good time and learn a lot.