Coscomatepec

I came to Coscomatepec for the bread, which is an honest reason, and I stayed because the mountain kept showing itself. The town sits on the green skirt of Pico de Orizaba, the highest thing in Mexico, and on a clear morning the volcano floats above the coffee slopes with a cap of snow that looks improbable this close to the tropics. I arrived on a bus that ground up out of the Veracruz lowlands into cool, damp air, and stepped off into a town that smelled, unmistakably, of wood smoke and baking flour.

The Bread of Coscomatepec

Pan de Coscomatepec has a reputation that travels much further than the town does. The bakeries here still work with hornos de leña — wood-fired ovens — and the bakers were happy to let me stand in the doorway and watch, faces lit orange, sliding long wooden peels in and out of the heat. The bread comes out dense, faintly sweet, with a crust that crackles: cocoles, picones, the fat rolls dusted with sugar that people buy by the dozen in paper bags.

I ate a still-warm picón standing on the corner, watching a woman balance a tray on her shoulder, and understood why families drive up from Córdoba just to fill the trunk of the car. Some foods do not survive being famous. This one has, because the ovens have not changed.

Coffee, Cold Air, and Colonial Streets

This is coffee country, and the cool, wet climate of these middle slopes is exactly what the plant likes. I walked out past the edge of town where the cobbles give way to dirt and the coffee bushes start, their cherries reddening in the shade of taller trees. A man cutting back weeds told me his family had picked these slopes for three generations, and that the good years and the bad years came down entirely to the mountain’s weather.

The town itself is small and steep and quietly handsome. Colonial streets tumble downhill toward the barranca — the deep ravine that edges Coscomatepec — with a plaza and a church at the top and views that open suddenly between buildings. It rained lightly most afternoons I was there, the fine highland drizzle they call chipichipi, and the streets shone and emptied and the whole place smelled of wet stone and coffee.

Under the Highest Mountain

You do not climb Pico de Orizaba from Coscomatepec — the serious ascents leave from the villages higher up and to the north — but you live under it here, and that is its own kind of relationship. On my last morning the cloud lifted before dawn and the volcano stood out hard and white against a pale sky, and half the town, it seemed, was out on their doorsteps looking at it, as though it were news.

I drank a coffee at a stall on the plaza, grown somewhere on the slopes below me, and watched the light climb down the mountain toward the town. By the time I finished the cup the cloud had come back and swallowed the summit whole. That is the deal here. The mountain shows itself when it decides to, and you learn to be ready.

Getting There

Coscomatepec sits about 20 kilometers northwest of Córdoba and a similar distance from the city of Orizaba, both reachable on the main Veracruz–Puebla corridor (Highway 150D). From Córdoba, frequent second-class buses and colectivos climb the winding road up to the town in under an hour. Come slowly, and give yourself a clear morning — the mountain is worth waiting for, and the bread is best straight from the oven.