Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz

I came to Miahuatlán on a Thursday because someone in Oaxaca City told me to come on Sunday for the market. I stayed four days. The town is small enough that by the second morning the woman running the comedor on Calle Independencia already had my coffee ready before I sat down — black, with a piece of pan de yema balanced on the saucer. Outside, the valley opened in every direction, agave plants dotting the slopes in that particular blue-green that means mezcal is coming, eventually, in ten or twenty or twenty-five years.

The Palenques

The distilleries here are not tourist operations. A few will let you walk in if you show up with basic Spanish and genuine curiosity, but there is no tasting menu, no gift shop, no printed brochure. Don Aurelio’s place is about two kilometers from the center down a dirt road I would not want to drive in the rainy season. His son does most of the roasting now, but Don Aurelio still manages the tahona — the stone wheel pulled by a horse that crushes the cooked agave before fermentation. He poured me tepeztate from an unmarked plastic bottle into a clay copita, and I held it for a moment before drinking. Smoky, yes, but also something green and mineral underneath. Tepeztate takes 25 years to reach maturity. A full working life. I thought about that on the walk back to town.

The Sunday Tianguis

The thing nobody tells you about the Miahuatlán tianguis is that it starts before dawn. By the time the sun clears the sierra, the stalls along the Mercado Flores Magón and spilling down the surrounding streets are already at full volume — Chatino women selling dried chiles de agua and amaranth, Zapotec vendors with piles of tlayudas stacked like plates, and one man who had driven in from some village I’d never heard of with nothing but three varieties of dried grasshoppers in different chile preparations. I ate a breakfast of estofado with rice and black beans for forty pesos at a folding table, sitting next to a farmer who was there to sell two goats and ended up buying a radio. The market has the chaotic, specific energy of a place that exists entirely for the people who live around it. There is exactly one stall aimed at tourists, and it was not doing well.

The Pace of the Place

Miahuatlán rewards the kind of travel where you do not have an itinerary. Afternoons get quiet after two, the streets clear, and the light on the zócalo goes golden around five. I spent one afternoon doing nothing in particular — a slow walk up toward the edge of town where the agave fields begin, a beer at a tienda with plastic chairs out front, a long look at the sierra going purple in the dusk. It was, by objective measure, uneventful. It was also the afternoon I remember most clearly.

Getting There

Miahuatlán is roughly 100 kilometers south of Oaxaca City on Highway 175. Colectivos leave from the second-class bus terminal in Oaxaca throughout the morning and take about two hours depending on stops — the cost is around 80 pesos. There are a handful of small hospedajes in town; book ahead if you are arriving for the Sunday tianguis.