Culiacán

It was a Tuesday at one in the afternoon when I walked into a seafood restaurant two blocks from the malecón and ordered aguachile negro. The lunch crowd around me was entirely composed of people in business clothes — the insurance adjusters and accountants and lawyers of a state capital city eating their midday meal with the unhurried efficiency of people who do this every day. No one was paying particular attention to anything. A television in the corner had a news program on, sound low. Two men at the table next to me were talking about a construction permit. This is what Culiacán actually looks like from the inside.

The aguachile negro arrived: raw shrimp in a black sauce of dried chiles, soy, and lime, with sliced cucumber and red onion, everything acidic and dark and precise. I have eaten aguachile in probably twenty different places along the Pacific coast of Mexico. This was the best. There is a specific depth to Sinaloa’s version — more chile complexity, less emphasis on pure citrus acidity — and the black variant in particular has something almost umami about it that the white version doesn’t. I ate slowly, took notes, ordered another beer.

Culiacán has been reduced, in most international coverage, to a single story. That story is not untrue. But it contains a city of about a million people who go to museums and eat lunch and send their children to school and live out their days in the way people live out their days everywhere.

The Museum on the Plaza

The Museo de Arte de Sinaloa — MASAS — occupies a nineteenth-century civic building on the main plaza, and it is genuinely one of the better contemporary art institutions I’ve visited in northwestern Mexico. The building itself is the first thing: a neo-classical facade with high ceilings and tiled floors that have survived into a collection of contemporary Mexican work, much of it from Sinaloan artists who are not particularly well known outside the region.

The day I went, there was a show of large-format photography documenting agricultural labor in the Culiacán valley — the tomato and pepper fields that produce a substantial portion of Mexico’s export vegetables. The images were technically accomplished and not at all comfortable to look at, which I appreciated. The accompanying text was also not comfortable. The museum was not trying to give me a tourism product. It was trying to show me something honest about the state it lived in.

I spent two hours. I was the only person there for most of it, which is the kind of museum attendance that in France would be considered a crisis and in Mexico seems to be considered a Tuesday.

The Jardín Botánico and the River

The Jardín Botánico del Ejido Culiacán is on the northern edge of the city and has a cactus collection that took me by surprise. I had not come to Culiacán expecting to spend an hour looking at cacti, but the collection is remarkable — hundreds of species, organized by region, with an emphasis on the Sonoran and Sinaloan desert varieties that grow in the immediate terrain. In the dry season the specimens have a sculptural severity that in full sun turns almost graphic. A very old saguaro stands near the entrance, maybe fifteen meters, and in the late afternoon it casts a shadow across the path that is more interesting than most of the art I’ve seen this year.

The malecón runs along the Tamazula River through the center of the city — a wide, tree-lined promenade where the city walks its dogs and jogs in the evenings. Families with strollers, teenagers on bikes, old men playing dominoes at concrete tables. The river is not spectacular as rivers go, but the malecón is functional civic infrastructure that the city uses every day, which is more than you can say for the malecones of many Mexican cities that have been built and abandoned.

Getting There and Getting Around

Culiacán has a regional airport with connections from Mexico City, Guadalajara, and several US border cities. ADO and other long-haul bus lines connect to Los Mochis to the north and Mazatlán to the south. The city itself is navigable by taxi and rideshare; the center is compact enough to walk if you stay near the plaza.

Eat the seafood. That is the primary instruction. Aguachile in its various forms — white, negro, verde — and ceviche and camarones a la diabla and whatever the daily special is at whatever family restaurant you find with plastic chairs and a handwritten menu. The Sinaloa coast produces exceptional seafood and Culiacán, even sitting inland from the water, cooks it better than most port cities I’ve visited. Stay two days. See the museum. Eat lunch slowly and watch the city around you being a city.