San José De Gracia may look like many another small town in Michoacan, but it is, in fact, hiding a secret. In the patios, kitchens and living rooms of almost all its citizens, lurk rare and beautiful orchids.
“All of us are addicted to growing them,” a local man told me.
“And this is why we started holding orchid exhibits here many years ago.”
For 12 years in a row San José held its Orchid Festival the first weekend of February, until Covid came along. The event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, but this year, it came back.
“They toned it down quite a bit,” reports visitor Rodrigo Orozco. “In 2019, the whole plaza was festooned with orchids and crowded with people. They had even erected a big stage where local girls were dancing in bikinis. Honestly, it was quite a show.”
In keeping with pandemic control guidelines, this year’s event was more of an expo and less of a spectacle, with attendance by many of Mexico’s experts not only in growing orchids, but especially in creating hybrids.
“We produce a big variety of plants, most of them exotic,” Enrique Navarro Olivares, the owner of OrquideasGDL.com, an online store operating out of the town of Tlajomulco, told me. “By this I mean they’re not endemic to Mexico. You know, our country has a huge biodiversity of orchids and many of the participants in this expo specialize in growing them, but we are interested in species from other parts of the world. Our challenge is to bring in species from Brazil, Indonesia or Africa, for example, all of which are exotic as far as we are concerned.”
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