Four routes worth taking through the Valles Centrales
My husband grew up in Oaxaca, where his family still lives. Over the years that has given us the kind of access to the Valles Centrales that comes from being in the valley often — showing up at a cousin’s house, eating lunch at a roadside comedor because someone said so, stopping at a market not because it was on an itinerary but because it was there on a Sunday. What follows draws on that time, organized into four routes worth taking from the city.
Route 1 — East on Highway 190: The Classic Valley Drive
Best for: A full day, start early.
Head east on Highway 190 and the valley opens up around you. By late afternoon you can have stood next to the widest tree in the world, browsed some of the finest handwoven textiles in Mexico, tasted mezcal at a family palenque, and walked the stone mosaic halls of a Zapotec religious center. Between those things: some of the best food in the valley, if you know where to stop.
Food on Route 1
The eastern route has good options at every point of the day. The right choice depends on your timing and whether you happen to be there on a Sunday.
Breakfast – Comedor El Tule, Santa María del Tule
Right in the center of town and easy to find. The empanadas are filled with mole amarillo or verde, and nothing here is what you would call light — you will leave feeling like you never want to see food again, until lunchtime. Worth every bite. If an empanada doesn’t seem like it will tide you over for the morning, order the carnitas. They are amazing.
Lunch – Comedor Doña Mary, Tlacolula
If you are on this route on a Sunday, make time for the Tlacolula tianguis. The market is one of the oldest weekly markets in the region. Doña Mary’s comedor, inside the covered market, serves mole negro and coloradito (which she calls mole rojo — the names vary by family and town). This is market food at its most elemental and most satisfying.
Lunch or Dinner – La Palapa de Raúl
The frijoles con hierba de conejo here are excellent, though this is a dish common enough in Oaxacan cooking that you’ll find it elsewhere too. It is one of those things that sounds modest and tastes like someone’s grandmother spent the morning on it. The chiles rellenos are spicy, but some of the best in the area.
Árbol del Tule, Santa María del Tule
The Árbol del Tule is a Montezuma cypress with a trunk circumference of around 58 meters, which makes it the widest tree in the world. It is approximately 2,000 years old, though some estimates put it older. It is located in the church courtyard of Santa María del Tule, about 9 kilometers east of Oaxaca City, and it is genuinely impressive in a way that photographs do not prepare you for. Scale only becomes apparent when you walk around it.
Teotitlán del Valle
Teotitlán is a Zapotec weaving village that has been producing wool textiles for centuries. The designs are geometric, drawn from pre-Columbian iconography — the same patterns you will see carved into the walls at Mitla — and the dyeing is done with natural materials: cochineal for the reds and pinks, indigo for blue, marigold for yellow. The combination of vegetable and insect dyes produces colors that are both saturated and warm in a way that synthetic dyes never quite match.
The village has dozens of family workshops, some of them very established and well-known, others smaller and less visited. If a family invites you in to watch the dyeing or weaving process, accept. The looms are large, the work is physical, and watching a pattern emerge from the urdimbre is one of those things that is hard to describe but easy to understand when you see it.
If you pay with a card, be aware that prices will be less flexible — the artisans pay fees and taxes on card transactions that they don’t pay on cash, and they price accordingly. Many workshops now have terminals, but cash gives you more room.
Santiago Matatlán and Gracias a Dios
The highway passes through Santiago Matatlán, where the roadside fields of maguey (agave) make the town’s claim to the title of world mezcal capital visually obvious before you have even stopped. We always visit Gracias a Dios, a family-run palenque that produces artisanal mezcal using copper stills and a tahona — a large stone wheel pulled by a donkey to crush the roasted piñas. The family will walk you through the entire process, from the pit-roasting to fermentation to distillation.
They will explain the different agave varieties they work with, and there will usually be several to taste. If you want somewhere to start: the Tepeztate is memorable — it tastes green and grassy, like spring in a glass. The Cuishe or Madre Cuishe, depending on what they have, is milder and a good introduction if you are newer to mezcal. They also produce a gin distilled with local herbs that is genuinely worth trying.
Mitla
Mitla was the most important religious center of the Zapotec world — the place where the dead passed into the underworld, and where the high priest of the Zapotecs, the uija-tao, held court. The Spanish built a Catholic church on top of the main ceremonial complex, which is historically typical and visually startling: from certain angles you see both the pre-Columbian grecas (the interlocking stone mosaic panels that are Mitla’s defining architectural feature) and the colonial church domes rising above them simultaneously.
The stone mosaics are extraordinary — thousands of individually cut and fitted stones forming geometric patterns across the entire surface of the walls, without mortar. They have been studied extensively and are still not fully understood. The patterns vary by building, and no two panels are identical.
Route 2 – West/Northwest: Monte Albán and Etla
Best for: A full day combining archaeology with a market morning.
Monte Albán and the Etla Valley are in the same general direction out of Oaxaca City — west and northwest. They work well as a combined day, with an early start at the Etla market for breakfast and then Monte Albán for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon.
Etla – Wednesday Market
The Etla market happens on Wednesdays, but the food hall is the reason to go. Walk through the market to the side where the bread vendors are, buy whatever is fresh that day, then find the staircase, and go up. At the top there is a comedor — I genuinely do not know whether it has a name; I have never seen a sign. Order the enmoladas and a jarro of hot chocolate. Dunk the bread in the hot chocolate while you wait for your enmoladas.
The coloradito here is among the best I have had anywhere. The comedor is small and has a few tables and is operated by women who have been cooking this food their whole lives. It is not to be missed.
Monte Albán
Monte Albán is a flattened mountaintop above the city that was first occupied around 500 BCE and remained a major Zapotec center for more than a millennium. It was built — by which I mean the top of a mountain was leveled and terraced into a monumental ceremonial space — through an engineering effort that remains difficult to fully account for. The main plaza is enormous and oriented to astronomical alignments; the ballcourt is among the oldest in Mesoamerica; the observatory is positioned to track specific celestial events.
The residential and agricultural terraces that once housed a peak population of 25,000 to 35,000 people are largely still buried — deliberately, both to preserve them and because serious archaeological excavation takes generations. What you see is the ceremonial center of a city that spread across the entire ridgeline.
A guide is worth the cost here. The site is enormous and the context matters enormously. Make sure you are working with an official guide — they carry badges from the INAH — and agree on a price before you start. The site museum near the entrance is also excellent; the objects recovered from the tombs include jade, gold, and ceramic funeral urns that are among the most sophisticated pre-Columbian works in Mexico.
Route 3 — South: Black Pottery, Alebrijes, and La Capilla
Best for: A half-day or a leisurely full day. The three stops are all on the same road south.
The road south out of Oaxaca City runs through a string of villages that between them represent three of the most distinctive craft traditions in the valley. You can do all three in a long half day, or stretch it into a full afternoon that ends at La Capilla in Zaachila.
San Bartolo Coyotepec – Barro Negro
San Bartolo is the home of barro negro, the lustrous black pottery that has become one of the most recognized objects in Mexican craft. The clay is unique to this area — a gray clay found locally that turns a deep, almost metallic black when fired. The finish is achieved not with glaze but with burnishing: the dried clay is polished with a quartz stone or gourd before firing, and the heat brings out the sheen.
The technique in its modern form was developed in the mid-twentieth century by Doña Rosa Real, who discovered that the pottery could be shaped by hand and with a tecomate (a gourd used as a mold) without a wheel, and that burnishing before the firing produced the characteristic finish. Her workshop, Doña Rosa, is now run by her descendants and remains the most established in the village — a good place to understand the tradition and see the range of what the clay can do, from small decorative pieces to enormous tinajas that take weeks to make.
The main market square is also worth a walk. The smaller workshops around town sometimes produce pieces that are more experimental — younger potters working within the barro negro tradition but pushing the forms in directions Doña Rosa’s generation would not have attempted. It is worth looking beyond the largest and most visible workshop if you have the time.
As elsewhere on this route: cash is preferred, and will give you more room on price than a card payment.
San Martín Tilcajete – Alebrijes
San Martín Tilcajete is about 25 minutes south of the city. It is the village most associated with alebrijes — the fantastical painted wooden figures that have become one of the most recognized symbols of Oaxacan craft. The tradition as it exists today is relatively recent (it developed in the second half of the twentieth century), but it draws on a much older Zapotec tradition of copal wood carving, and the imagery — jaguar-cats with wings, serpents with feathers, hybrid creatures from a mythology that is neither fully pre-Columbian nor fully colonial — has roots that go considerably deeper than the tourist market.
The most celebrated workshop in the village is that of Jacobo y María Ángeles, whose work has reached international museums and collections. A visit takes about an hour; allow a little time to walk around afterward. The carving is done by the men, the painting by the women, and watching the painting in process — the detail work on a single figure can take days — is one of those things that reframes what handmade means.
If you cannot make the trip south, Jacobo y María Ángeles also have a gallery in Oaxaca City on the Andador Turístico, the pedestrian street in the center. It is not the same as seeing the workshop, but it gives you a sense of the range of their work.
As with Teotitlán: cash gives you flexibility on price that a card payment will not.
La Capilla, Zaachila
A few kilometers further south, in the town of Zaachila, is La Capilla. The building is open-sided and covered, with large tinajas on pedestals at the entrance, and signs referencing Amador Pérez Dimas, the composer of the danzón “Nereidas.” It is a traditional Oaxacan kitchen with more than fifty years of family recipes behind it.
Order the mole negro or the coloradito, the carne frita, the memelas, or ask for the sampler plate if you want to try several things at once. It works for breakfast on the way out or a late lunch on the way back. The whole place has the feeling of a Sunday lunch that stretches into the afternoon, which is one of the best feelings there is.
Route 4 – Hierve el Agua
Best for: A full day on its own. Do not combine with Route 1.
Hierve el Agua is a mineral spring at the edge of a cliff, where the calcium-carbonate-saturated water has formed petrified waterfalls that cascade — apparently — down the mountainside. The “waterfalls” are stone formations shaped by millennia of mineral deposits; the water no longer actually falls but pools at the top in natural infinity pools with a view across the valley below. It is one of those places that looks like a rendering and is not.
Adding Hierve el Agua to Route 1 makes for a very long day. We have friends who have not entirely forgiven us for that particular itinerary. Go early, bring water, and either make it the only stop of the afternoon or give Route 1 its own day and do Hierve el Agua on a separate excursion.
Practical Notes
Getting around
A car gives you the most flexibility on all four routes. Colectivos (shared taxis and minibuses) run from the second-class bus terminal to most destinations and are inexpensive; the tradeoff is time and the inability to stop where you want. A private driver for the day is a comfortable middle option — ask your hotel for a recommendation and expect to pay around 800–1,200 pesos depending on the route. For Monte Albán specifically there are tour buses and colectivos from the city center. I would not do Hierve el Agua by public transport.
Money
Bring cash for everything outside the city. Most comedores and market vendors do not accept cards, and ATMs in the smaller towns are not always reliable. Many artisans now have card terminals, but they will be less flexible on price when the payment is electronic — they absorb the fees and taxes on those transactions that they do not pay on cash. Cash gives you more room.
Negotiating
At markets and in craft workshops, regatear is expected and perfectly normal. Approach it as a conversation, not a confrontation, and do not negotiate for something you are not genuinely willing to buy at the price you propose.
Timing
Route 1 requires an early start to do it well. Monte Albán rewards arriving before 9:30 a.m. The Tlacolula market is Sundays only — a significant difference. The Etla Wednesday market is a bonus, not a requirement. Mitla closes early; check current hours before you go.
Hierve el Agua
Give it its own day. Start before 9 a.m., bring water and sunscreen, and wear shoes you do not mind getting wet — swimming is permitted in the pools at the top of the site. It is worth checking locally before you go: access passes through ejido communities, which occasionally close the route due to local matters.
Guides
Monte Albán particularly benefits from a guide. The site is too large and too dense in meaning to absorb independently, and the official guides are genuinely knowledgeable. Look for the INAH badge, agree on a price before you begin, and factor in a tip for a good tour.
Photography
Textile workshops in Teotitlán and the palenque in Matatlán generally welcome photography — ask first out of courtesy. At Monte Albán, normal camera use is fine; professional tripod setups require a permit.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far is Mitla from Oaxaca City?
About 46 kilometers east, roughly 45–55 minutes by car on Highway 190.
Can I visit Monte Albán and Mitla on the same day?
They are in opposite directions from the city, so combining them means a lot of driving. Technically possible but I would not recommend it — you will be rushing both sites. Pick one.
Is the Tlacolula market open every day?
The big market is Sundays only. The market itself is open every day, but it is a fraction of the Sunday experience when the nearby streets fill with vendors from all over the Valles Centrales.
How do I get to Hierve el Agua without a car?
Take a colectivo from the second-class terminal to Mitla, then transfer to a pickup truck service that runs up to Hierve el Agua when full. Budget about 5–6 hours round trip. Organized tours from the city are also widely available and handle the logistics for you.
Is Hierve el Agua open year-round?
Yes. The dry season (October–May) offers clearer skies; the rainy season (June–September) makes the surrounding landscape exceptionally green. Access occasionally closes due to local disputes with the ejido communities — worth checking before you go.
What should I buy in Teotitlán del Valle?
Wool rugs are the obvious answer, but the village also produces beautiful blankets, table runners, and small decorative pieces. Look for natural dyes — the sellers who use them are usually happy to explain the process, and the colors are more complex and lasting than synthetic versions.
What should I buy in San Bartolo Coyotepec?
Anything that catches your eye. The small animal figures are easy to carry and make excellent gifts. If you have room in your luggage, one of the larger tinajas is a genuine piece of craft. The perforated lantern-style pieces are also distinctive — they are designed to let candlelight through the cutout patterns.
Have you made the drive out to Hierve el Agua? I’d love to know what you thought — and whether you were wiser than us and saved it for its own day.