Ruins, Rugs and a Giant Tree in Oaxaca
A day on the road east of Oaxaca
Looking for the practical guide to this route — distances, what to bring, where to eat, and how to fit it into a day? All of that now lives in the full Day Trips from Oaxaca City post. What follows is the story of one particular day on this road.
My husband grew up in Oaxaca, which means we have driven the eastern valley route more times than I can count, yet it never feels like a commute — the turn at Santa María del Tule, the road narrowing toward Teotitlán, the final stretch to Mitla where the highway gets rougher and the agave fields press in from the sides. The sky is enormous, and the spaces are wide open in a way they could never be in the city.
There was one trip, early in our relationship, when I was seeing all of it for the first time. We left the city before eight, which felt unnecessarily early until we arrived at the Tule tree and had it almost entirely to ourselves.
The tree that stops you cold
The Árbol del Tule is one of those things that photographs consistently fail to prepare you for. I had seen pictures. I thought I understood what a tree with the widest trunk in the world would look like. I did not.
It stands in the courtyard of the church in Santa María del Tule, about nine kilometers out of the city, and the first thing you notice is that the trunk is not cylindrical — it bulges and folds into itself in forms that read as faces, animals, shapes. A local boy approached us almost immediately with an offer to give us a tour, pointing out the elephant, the lion, the crocodile hidden in the bark. He was about ten years old and absolutely right about all of them.
We had breakfast at one of the comedores in the center of town before we left. I had an empanada de amarillo con quesillo, which remains my all-time favorite Oaxacan dish — corn dough stuffed with yellow mole and Oaxacan string cheese, cooked on the comal. Mario had the same. We both ate too much and got back in the car.
Mitla, where the walls remember everything
Mitla was the religious heart of the Zapotec world — the place the dead passed through on the way to the underworld, where the high priest held court, where the most complex stonework in pre-Columbian Mexico was built without mortar and has stayed there for a thousand years.
I remember standing in front of the grecas — the interlocking geometric panels that cover every wall of the ceremonial complex — and feeling the weight of something that was meant to be taken seriously. The Spanish built a church on top of the main temple, which you see simultaneously from certain angles: the geometric precision of the Zapotec stonework below, the colonial domes above. The juxtaposition is a visual representation of a social reality.
There are guides at the entrance. Take one. The context is too dense to absorb on your own, and a good guide turns the mosaics from beautiful patterns into an argument about a civilization’s understanding of death, time, and order.
Teotitlán, on the way back
We stopped at Teotitlán del Valle on the return, which is the right order — it sits between Mitla and the city, and by afternoon the light in the workshop courtyards is warm and low and exactly right for looking at color.
The village has been weaving wool textiles for centuries. The geometric designs come from pre-Columbian sources — the same patterns you just saw at Mitla, expressed in thread instead of stone. The dyes are natural: cochineal for red and pink, indigo for blue, marigold for yellow.
I bought a small rug that day — geometric, deep red and yellow — that we still use. I know exactly where it came from and whose hands made it. That is not something you get very often.
Have you driven this route? I’d love to know what you stopped for.
