Cerritos

I stopped in Cerritos because I was between places — SLP city behind me, Zacatecas still two hours north — and the sign on the highway suggested the town had something. It did. What I had not anticipated was staying long enough to eat lunch, drink two coffees, and miss the bus I had vaguely planned to take. The town has a particular quality common to smaller colonial settlements on the altiplano: it is well-kept without being self-conscious about it, proud without advertising that pride anywhere tourists might actually look.

The Cathedral That Forgot Its Town’s Size

The Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol is the kind of building that stops a conversation. Its neoclassical facade — twin towers in pale ochre cantera, an ornate portal that someone clearly spent years arguing about — faces the jardín with the confidence of a cathedral in a city ten times Cerritos’ size. I stood in front of it for longer than I care to admit, trying to understand the proportions. The nave inside is high and cool, lit by the particular quality of light that comes through clear glass in early afternoon on the altiplano — very bright and very flat all at once. The retablo behind the main altar is gilded without being gaudy, a distinction that colonial Mexican churches frequently fail to achieve. There are side chapels with votive offerings, a few hand-lettered thank-you notes pinned below saints, and the slow traffic of women in rebozos coming in from the street. The whole thing functions exactly as it was meant to function, which is the best thing you can say about any church.

What the Jardín Offers at Midday

The central plaza in Cerritos is small enough that you can see across it clearly, which means the café terraces on the south side have a direct sightline to the cathedral facade — an arrangement that the coffee-drinkers there seem entirely accustomed to. I ate at a family comedor on Calle Allende, one of those places with a handwritten menu on the wall and a woman who checked in twice to make sure the caldo tlalpeño was to my liking. It was. The soup arrived with a chipotle floating in the broth, half an avocado on the side, and a stack of fresh corn tortillas that I worked through methodically. By two o’clock the plaza had filled with schoolchildren and their grandmothers; by three it had emptied again. The rhythm of a town like this is not difficult to read once you sit still long enough to watch it.

What I Would Do Again

On a return visit I would arrive earlier — by nine in the morning the light on the cathedral towers is extraordinary, and the market near the bus station has the kind of produce stalls that only exist when there is nowhere else to buy produce within forty kilometers. There is a viewpoint on the hill above town, a short walk up a cobbled street that climbs past houses with bougainvillea overhanging the walls. From there, Cerritos looks like exactly what it is: a small, intact colonial town on a high, open plain, the cathedral just slightly too large for everything around it. That proportion, I eventually decided, is the whole point.

Getting There

Cerritos sits on Federal Highway 49, roughly 120 kilometers north of San Luis Potosí city and 100 kilometers southeast of Zacatecas. Direct second-class buses run from SLP’s Central Camionera Norte; journey time is around ninety minutes. There is no reason to rent a car. Most visitors come through on a loop between the two state capitals — the town rewards an early-afternoon stop and punishes anyone in a hurry to leave.