Acaxochitlán

Hidalgo does a trick I never tire of: an hour’s drive can carry you from cactus and dust into a world of pine and mist, and Acaxochitlán is the payoff at the green end of that road. I climbed up from the arid center of the state on a grey morning, the fog thickening as I gained altitude, and by the time I reached the town the whole landscape had gone soft and cool and smelled of woodsmoke and wet earth. I bought a bag of blackberries from a woman at the roadside, still cold from the hillside, and ate them driving, staining my fingers, absurdly happy.

Coffee, Blackberries, and the Green Slopes

This is a farming municipality first and a destination second, and its wealth is written on the slopes: coffee under shade trees, and above all zarzamora — blackberries — grown across the hills in quantities that surprised me. In season the roadsides are lined with people selling them by the basket, cheap and impossibly good. I walked a bit of a coffee slope with a grower who explained, with the mix of pride and complaint universal to farmers everywhere, how the mountain cold slows the cherries and concentrates them. The mist that makes this place feel enchanted is also, prosaically, why the coffee is worth drinking. I bought a kilo I had no way to grind and regretted nothing.

The Laguna and the Pine Forest

Tucked in the hills near town is the Laguna de Atezca, and I went looking for it more out of restlessness than expectation. What I found was still dark water ringed by pine forest, the far shore dissolving into fog, everything hushed the way high forests are hushed. A few families were out with kayaks and a man was selling roasted corn from a cart, but mostly it was quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear water dripping off needles. I walked the shore until the path petered out and stood a while doing nothing but breathing air that felt scrubbed clean. After weeks in the lowlands, the cold and the pine smell hit me like a tonic.

Bread, Fruit Wine, and the Market

The town itself is a proper market town, Nahua and Otomí, and its particular pleasures are edible. Acaxochitlán is known for its artisan bread — warm, dense, faintly sweet loaves I ate too much of — and for vino de frutas, homemade fruit wines pressed from the blackberries and other fruit the hills produce in excess. I sat in the market while the fog pressed against the doorways and worked through a plate of bread and a small glass of blackberry wine that was sweet and rough and exactly right for the weather. A vendor pressed a second variety on me to try, made from a fruit I didn’t recognize, and refused payment. The town runs on that kind of easy generosity, the confidence of a place that grows its own good things.

Getting There

Acaxochitlán lies in the eastern sierra of Hidalgo, on the highway that runs between Pachuca and Tulancingo toward the Puebla sierra. From Mexico City it’s roughly two to two and a half hours; from Pachuca, under an hour and a half. Buses toward Tulancingo and the sierra pass close, but a car makes the coffee slopes, the laguna, and the market easy to string together. Bring a jacket — the altitude keeps it cool and the fog is a near-daily visitor — and come hungry. This is a place to eat blackberries off your fingers and let the mountain weather do what it wants. Don’t fight the fog. It’s the whole mood.