A three-hour bus ride from from Mérida took us to the smaller coastal city of Campeche, also a UNESCO site and described accurately in the guidebooks as a “colonial gem.” After the rigors and heat of Mérida, we immediately loved this place. Cooler, due to a terrific windstorm our first day. (Here I am, blown in with one of the 16th century pirates who regularly sacked Campeche and killed its Spanish settlers after it became a rich port exploiting the local resources – once the native Mayan were vanquished, of course).

Quieter and safer since 1685, when King Carlos of Spain ordered a wall built around the city. Some of the ramparts remain, and workers are busy reconstructing the rest of the wall, cutting blocks of the skull-white fine limestone the city is built upon, covering everything with a thin layer of dust.


And more recently, with the UNESCO anointment in 1999, the restoration of many of the one-story houses within the historic center, painted ice-cream tones, and the creation of several pedestrian-only streets. Ah, how I love quiet, walkable, “gawkable” streets.

Plazas and walkways are dotted with the amazing bronze sculptures of an artist we’d never heard of, but will not soon forget, Leonora Carrington.

Born 1917 into upper-class England, Carrington was a rebellious girl who declared herself a Surrealist by age 19, ended up with Max Ernst in Nazi France in the 1930’s, in Spain during the civil war, then in Mexico by age 25, where she joined the great Mexican artistic movement of the period: Frida + Diego, Buñuel, et al. When we saw the date on the base of one sculpture as 2010, we couldn’t believe she was still working. But she was; she only died in 2011, at 94, an iconoclast faithful to her Surrealist visions to the very end. I can’t wait to read her biography.
Back to Campeche: originally a Maya city called A Kim Pech (with the wonderful translation, “Lord Sun Sheep Tick”), the city is doing it best to promote tourism, fast becoming one base of its economy, and interestingly most of the tourists are Europeans – especially French, according to conversations we heard around us. Cultural life abounds with mansions and 18th century convents restored into cultural centers, with music, dancing and readings every night. Young people are everywhere, interviewing tourists for their high school project – “What most you like about our city?” on their way to dance and music classes. I came across several excellent bookstores, which always makes me happy whether I buy or not.
We were sorry to leave after two days but we were worried about traveling during Semana Santa, the long Easter vacation that many Mexicans stretch to ten days. So we bought bus tickets for our next destination: the highlands of Chiapas and San Cristobal de las Casas, a city Michael and I visited in the 1980s during our first years in Costa Rica. Our only choice to get there was an overnight bus trip, 12 hours that turned into 14 hours when some local indigenous communities blocked the road. Although the Zapatista movement has settled down, political turmoil remains, it seems.
More from San Cristobal soon….