Galeana

The road south from Monterrey to Galeana climbs steadily for two hours through the Sierra Madre Oriental, and the scenery gets serious quickly. Out of the industrial basin of the city, through the limestone foothills that start almost immediately, up into actual sierra country where the canyon walls rise on both sides of the highway and the rock faces catch the afternoon light in ways that make it impossible not to slow down. I stopped twice to take photographs. The photographs do not capture it but I took them anyway.

Galeana sits at around 1,700 meters in a high valley that opens between the sierra ranges — apple orchards, peach trees, cold air that surprised me in November. I had expected northeastern Mexico to be hot and dry. The south of Nuevo León is something else.

Potrero Chico

The Cañón de Potrero Chico is five kilometers from the center of Galeana, and the limestone walls that define it are around 300 meters at their highest. The canyon is internationally known among rock climbers — competitors at the Sport Climbing World Cup have trained here, and on the day I visited there were climbers on the walls from at least four countries by my count, though I was counting by overhead snippets of conversation and may have been wrong about one.

I am not a climber. I say this upfront because the way I experienced Potrero Chico is entirely from the perspective of someone standing at the bottom of a vertical wall looking up at people doing something I cannot do and do not intend to learn. This is still a significant experience. The walls are pale grey limestone, fractured and textured, and at mid-afternoon they were catching the sun at an angle that made the rock faces almost luminous. The climbers were tiny against them — visible mainly as movement, as colored ropes curving down from the high routes.

A man near the base had binoculars and offered them to me when he saw me craning. Through the binoculars the scale became legible: a climber forty meters up, crimping a hold with fingers I could now see, moving with the kind of careful deliberateness that is the opposite of how climbing looks from below. I stood there for a long time watching.

The canyon floor is a dirt road through scrub and rock, with camping spots used by climbers from around the world who stay for weeks. Some of them had the organized, settled look of people who have been somewhere long enough to acquire furniture. One camp had a small camp kitchen and a clothesline. This is a serious destination for serious people, and the mountain village of Galeana fifteen minutes away serves them produce and cheese and cold drinks without making a particular fuss about any of it.

The Orchards and the Market

Coming back into Galeana from the canyon in the late afternoon, I stopped at a roadside orchard that had a hand-lettered sign advertising manzanas — apples. The woman running the stand was selling bags of apples and also a few individual ones for people, like me, who wanted one immediately. I gave her ten pesos and she handed me an apple and pointed at the trees behind her stand, which were still heavy with fruit, and told me this was the best week of the season.

It was a very good apple. Cold from the altitude, tart, with the kind of density that apples from warm climates don’t have. France produces excellent apples in Normandy and the Loire valley and I will not claim that this was better than a good Norman apple, but it was its own thing, the product of high altitude and cold sierra nights and a specific valley in the south of Nuevo León, and I ate it standing in the road next to someone’s orchard at four in the afternoon and it was exactly right.

The town market sells the local cheeses: queso blanco and queso asadero, the stretched and melted variety used in northern Mexican cooking. I bought a piece of asadero from a vendor who cut it from a larger wheel, wrapped it in paper, and charged me an amount so modest I asked her to repeat it. She repeated it with mild patience, as if this were not the first time a visitor had done this.

Getting There

Two hours from Monterrey by the federal highway south — the route passes Linares and then climbs into the sierra proper. The drive is the experience; you don’t need to rush it. Galeana itself has basic services: a few restaurants, some grocery stores, the market. For overnight accommodation the options are limited, but the climbing community around Potrero Chico has produced a few simple guesthouses and camping facilities near the canyon.

Come in October or November for the apple harvest and for weather that is cool without being cold. The canyon is accessible year-round, and the climbing community is there in force from October through March. In July and August the monsoon rains come and the canyon can flood; ask locally before going in.