Michuacan – Morelia, Patzcuaro and Uruapan

This past weekend (Aug. 10-12) Sheila, Rachel and I set off to explore Michuacan. After a six hour bus ride that involved a stop in Toluca, we made it to Morelia, the state capital. The historic downtown was beautiful, clean and filled with things to do. We only made it to two of the nine (!) museums there – a regional history museum and the Museo de Dulces (Candy Museum.) The state is known for its candy production, especially ate (ah-tay), a sticky sweet made by heating fruit puree with sugar. Think apple butter, hardened.

 

 

The rest of the day we spent touring the downtown, first via trolley tour. My Spanish was put to the test on that one, because the guide spoke pretty fast. We stopped once on the tour to go inside the Sanctuario de Guadalupe, which has one of the most unique interiors I’ve ever seen. The walls and ceilings were covered with intricate gold flowers. It rivaled, if not exceeded, the beauty of the city’s central cathedral.

After the tour, we walked around, visited a student art gallery, and shopped in the Mercado de Dulces y Artesanias. After dinner and churros, we listened to live music at local bar a few blocks from our hotel.

 

 

The next day, we took a taxi about an hour to Patzcuaro, a much smaller city but equally charming in its own way. Instead of impressive Spanish style architecture, Patzcuaro is filled with white and red adobe buildings that indigenous settlers built years before the Spaniards arrived. We walked around the two main plazas and peeked inside at least three churches.

 

We also visited an art museum housed in an old university building that had Purépechan ruins right behind it. There wasn’t much left of those ruins, but it was still cool to be able to walk right in them. In the afternoon, we took a half hour boat ride to the island of Janitzio, which was supposedly better for artisan shopping and THE place to go on Dia de Los Muertos in November. The market was a little disappointing because a lot of the vendors carried the same types of crafts. But I think it was still worthwhile to go there. We had fun walking around and even stumbled onto a huge quinceañeras party that was being held under a covered shelter.

 

 

On our last day we took another hour bus ride to Uruapan to see the national park there and whatever other attractions we could find downtown. Many people use Uruapan as a jumping point to see the Volcano of San Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro, more simply known as Volcan Paricutin, but we weren’t sure we’d have time. (Guidebooks recommend having at least 8 hours for the trip and we needed to catch a bus back to Cuernavaca that night.) In retrospect, I think we should’ve gone for the volcano because Uruapan wasn’t that exciting. The park was more like a botanical garden than a place where you could hike around and it was so crowded with families that it was hard to appreciate the nature.

 

As for the rest of the town, there wasn’t much to do. We liked looking at the craft market and found a small free art museum off the main square, but all this only took a couple of hours. We ended up going back to Morelia early to enjoy dinner by the former aquaduct and walk around the romantic cobblestone lanes.

 

Overall, it was a great trip. I would definitely recommend visiting Michuacan – especially Morelia. It’s well worth the bus ride.