Querétaro City

I arrived in Querétaro with all the wrong expectations, which is the best way to arrive anywhere. I had been to San Miguel de Allende twice and enjoyed it both times while also spending both times slightly aware that the colonial experience had been curated for me — that the charm was real but so was the service economy around it, that the light on the stones was the same light every travel photograph had shown me. I expected Querétaro to be a version of that. It is not.

Querétaro has tourists. It has a UNESCO designation. It has colonial architecture that is, objectively, as beautiful as anything in San Miguel. But it also has a working population of 800,000 people who go about their business in the centro as if the colonial buildings are simply where they live and work, which they are. The streets feel occupied rather than preserved. The restaurants serve the people who live in the city, not only the people visiting it. The price of a comida corrida at midday reflects this in a way I found immediately reassuring.

The Aqueduct at Dawn

The aqueduct was built between 1726 and 1738 to carry water from a spring at La Cañada into the city — 74 arches, some of them nearly 30 meters tall, stretching for nearly a kilometer across what was then open valley. It still stands. It is not a ruin; it is a structure that has simply continued to exist, absorbing four centuries of climate and the particular indignity of being located on a busy city avenue now, with cars passing beneath arches that were designed to carry only water and light.

I walked the length of it on my first morning, before 7am, when the light comes from the east and turns the pink stone (cantera rosa, quarried locally, used everywhere in Querétaro’s buildings) into something close to copper. The arches at that hour have a depth to them — each one framing the next, the perspective contracting toward a vanishing point. A jogger passed me. Two women walking with coffee cups. A dog that had claimed the rightmost walking lane as its territory. The aqueduct is not marked or fenced or managed as a tourist attraction; it simply extends along Avenida Zaragoza and you walk alongside it.

What struck me most was its scale relative to the reason it was built. This is municipal infrastructure. The city needed water and commissioned one of the most beautiful feats of colonial engineering in the Americas to deliver it. The equivalent in France would be — well, there isn’t really an equivalent in France. We tend to bury our water infrastructure.

The Mercado de la Cruz

The market is a ten-minute walk from the main square, in the working-class barrio that shares its name, and is the reason I tell people to spend at least two full days in Querétaro rather than passing through. The building is a nineteenth-century structure with a glass roof that diffuses the midday sun into something soft and even. The stalls are organized by product — cheese, produce, spices, cooked food — in the approximate way of all traditional Mexican markets, which is to say loosely organized but internally coherent once you understand the logic.

The quesillo counter is where I spent the most time. Oaxaca produces the famous version, but Querétaro has its own string cheese tradition — firmer, with a sharper lactic edge — and the vendor who sold me a ball of it also offered queso de tuna, which I had never encountered before. Queso de tuna is not a dairy product at all: it’s a pressed block made from the concentrated juice of the prickly pear (tuna), cooked with sugar until it sets into a deep garnet-colored slab that tastes simultaneously of fruit and caramel and something slightly mineral. It’s sold in small wedges and eaten as a sweet. I bought three and ate one immediately, standing at the counter, which the vendor seemed to regard as the appropriate response.

The cooked food section operates from around noon to 3pm and serves the market workers, the shoppers, and anyone who has figured out that this is where lunch happens. I sat at a narrow counter and ordered a plate of enchiladas queretanas — which are not the same as enchiladas elsewhere, being made with chile ancho and served with potatoes and carrot and a type of fresh cheese specific to the region — and ate among people who were not thinking about their meal as an experience but simply eating it.

The Centro Histórico and Its Bars

The centro histórico is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is, frankly, beautiful in the way that takes you a little while to appreciate because it’s not shouting at you. The streets are mostly stone, the buildings mostly pink cantera, the plazas numerous and varied — the Jardín Zenea, the Plaza de Armas, the Jardín de la Corregidora, each with a different character, a different population at different hours. The Templo de Santa Cruz is where Maximilian surrendered before his execution in 1867, and there’s a museum in the convent buildings beside it that tells this history with what I can only describe as dignified Queretano pride.

What surprised me was the bar scene, which I stumbled into rather than sought. The area around Calle Peralta and Pasteur has a dense concentration of mezcalerías and bars occupying colonial buildings — stone arches, interior courtyards, rooms that were probably something else in 1750 and are now dimly lit and playing Calexico. I went looking for dinner and ended up drinking mezcal in a courtyard that had a fig tree growing in the center of it. The fig tree was enormous, probably very old, and the tables arranged around it had the feeling of being inside the tree more than beside it. Lia ordered a cocktail that had xoconostle (sour cactus fruit) in it and spent twenty minutes describing it to me while I was unable to verify her description because my glass was empty.

The wine connection is real and growing: the Sierra Gorda and the hills north of the city have been producing wine since the 1990s, and the wine bars in the centro are serious about stocking it. Freixenet has a major operation in the region. But the smaller producers, like Bodegas del Marqués and Viñedos La Redonda, are the more interesting story — wine made at altitude, in a context where most people would have planted agave instead, and succeeding at it.

Practical Notes

Querétaro is three hours from Mexico City by bus (ETN or Primera Plus from Terminal Norte), or 45 minutes by plane. The centro histórico is compact and walkable; most of what matters is within 20 minutes on foot.

The aqueduct runs along Avenida Zaragoza, accessible at any hour. Early morning is quieter. The Mercado de la Cruz is open daily from around 8am; the cooked food section operates noon to 3pm, after which stalls close down.

The Templo de Santa Cruz and its convent-museum are open Tuesday through Sunday, with a small admission fee. The Museo Regional, in a former Franciscan monastery on the main plaza, has one of the better collections of colonial art in the Bajío if that’s your interest.

For accommodation: the hotels inside colonial buildings in the centro are worth the slight price premium — waking up in a building with a 300-year-old courtyard changes the register of the visit. For wine: several bodegas offer tastings and can be visited with advance notice; ask at the tourism office on the Jardín Zenea for current options.

Querétaro is not undiscovered, but it has maintained something that San Miguel has largely given up: the sense that the city exists for the people who live in it, and that you are welcome to participate in it rather than observe it.