Morelos

Morelos is the warm valley south of Mexico City — 80 kilometers from the capital but 1,200 meters lower in altitude, which means a climate that feels like another country: 24 degrees in January, 30 in May, the sugarcane and mango and avocado growing at the elevation where the capital grows only corn. The Aztec emperors built their vacation palaces here (the ruins of Oaxtepec, the botanical garden complex at Huaxtepec), and contemporary Mexico City residents continue the tradition by maintaining weekend houses in the valley.

The state is named for José María Morelos — the mestizo priest who took over the Mexican independence movement after Hidalgo’s execution in 1811 and ran it for the next four years with considerably more military competence. The state’s revolutionary identity is dual: Morelos gave the independence movement its only sustained military success, and a century later Emiliano Zapata — born in Anenecuilco, Morelos, in 1879 — gave the Mexican Revolution its most radical agrarian demand (Tierra y Libertad, Land and Liberty) and his state its most enduring political identity. Zapatista murals are still common in Morelos villages.

Tepoztlán (covered separately) — the pyramid-above-the-town destination 30 kilometers south of Cuernavaca — is the state’s primary destination for visitors arriving from Mexico City. The Tepozteco pyramid sits at 2,300 meters on a cliff above the colonial town; getting there requires a 45-minute uphill hike on a stone path. The town below has a large organic market on weekends, a 16th-century Dominican convent, and a permanent population of Mexico City artists and writers who moved there for the climate and the relative quiet.

Cuernavaca — the state capital, called “the city of eternal spring” for its 18th-century weather — has the Diego Rivera murals in the Cortés Palace, the Jardín Borda (the lavish 18th-century botanical garden that Maximilian and Carlota used as their weekend palace), and the only functioning Buddhist temple complex in Mexico (Nippon Bodaiji).