Imagine that a cave full of stalactites, stalagmites, and bizarre stone formations had been uprooted by the gods and turned inside out, exposing its guts to the air.

Or just visit Hierve el Agua (the water boils, in Spanish), located about two hours east of Oaxaca de Juárez. No need to imagine.

A fresh water spring courses through the marble-lined interior of the mountain, leaching minerals on its way to the open air. As the mineral-rich water runs down the mountain side, it leaves behind calcium carbonate and other deposits, which, over thousands of years, have slowly built up into spectacular stone waterfalls, cascading hundreds of feet to the valley floor below.

There are two primary falls: the Cascada Chica and the Cascada Grande. The picture at the top of this post is of Grande, taken from Chica. You can hike over to the top of Grande, which is supposed to be quite the view. And quite the hike. I’m not prone to scraping images off the internet, but we didn’t take the hike to Grande. If we had taken that hike, this is what Chica looks like from Grande.

But let’s back up and start at the beginning.

Mezcal

We’d visited Hierve el Agua on our previous Oaxaca trip in 2019, right before lockdown. We knew two things: that the site itself was magical, and that the best mezcal we’ve ever had came from a roadside mezcalero on the way. With my sister, Nef, coming for a visit, it seemed like a return trip would kill two birds and several livers.

We’d done the full taste testing in 2019, so I knew to zero in on the tepextate. The tepextate agave takes the longest to mature of all the agaves, as long as 35 years before it can be harvested. The result is a complex, funky, smoky miracle that blossoms on the tongue for what seems like eternity. As if bottles of Glenfiddich and Rum Fire had cheated on their spouses and kept the baby.

We picked up four liters (some is heading back to the States as gifts) at $15 each (up from $11/liter in 2019) and hit the road for the last leg to Hierve el Agua. The ostensible purpose of the trip, after all.

The Vista

Hierve al Agua is basically cliffs (Grande and Chica) rising up from the valley floor. But the entire area is pretty much cliffs rising above the valley floor, just without the calcium carbonate. Once you’re up at cliff height, the panoramic view is wondrous.

The Living Mountain

The process by which the stone waterfalls were created is still going on. Water spills out of the rock face and into pools before making its way down the mountain, creating crazy patterns and geometric shapes, somehow organic and structured at the same time.

Pools

There are natural spots at the top of Chica that collect water, but there are also a couple of pools created specifically for swimming that fill with the mineral rich water as it tumbles off the mountain. On a hot day, which is most of them, families come to Hierve el Agua for the swimming.

Hierve el Agua feels timeless, not in the sense of being unchanging, but in the sense that its existence proves our inability to grasp the concept of time. Yet its future is being built moment by moment, molecule by molecule, which can somehow be witnessed as it’s occurring. You stand with one foot in real time and one foot in geological time, straddling eons.

A Completely Magical Day

Somehow the day continued to deliver. After getting back to Oaxaca de Juárez, we enjoyed what we all agreed was one of the finest meals of our lives at Casa Oaxaca, followed by winding down with shots of the day’s tepextate, providing a smoky, ethereal offramp to a perfect day.

The Road Goes On Forever And The Party Never Ends

As it happens, the next day was more thematically linked to Hierve el Agua than we’d planned or imagined. We’d rented a car to make the Hierve el Agua trek (mostly because I knew a tour or bus wouldn’t stop at the mezcalero) and kept it for an extra day.

We spent that day around the various iterations of Etla just 30 minutes north of Oaxaca de Juarez. There’s San Agustin Etla, Villa de Etla, San Miguel Etla, and more. We had three stops in mind: Taller Arte Papel Oaxaca, which makes both custom papers and crazy things out of paper that shouldn’t be possible (and which we just discovered weeks after going had also been founded by Francisco Toledo); El Castillo de los Duendes, a multi-story castle filled with installations of, and I swear I’m not making this up, Keebler elves and sexy fairies, which unsurprisingly warrants its own post; and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín.

Centro is housed in an abandoned factory built in 1883. It was acquired by famed Mexican artist Francisco Toledo in 2000, and opened to the public in 2006. The facility, with its renovated exhibition spaces, myriad educational programs, and beautiful grounds, was meant to amplify the work Toledo had done in establishing Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca in Oaxaca de Juárez.

We had no idea what was currently on exhibit. We went for no reason more profound than that it was supposed to be a beautiful space. One of the exhibits was a collaboration featuring the work of Macrina Mateo, a potter famous for honoring the tradition of red clay pottery from her village of San Marcos Tlapazola while modernizing the shapes and forms. Her collaboration with Gustavo Perez featured daring biomorphic forms that were somehow simultaneously futuristic and grounded in tradition.

The Main Attraction

As amazing as the pottery was, the main exhibition hall was the treat. It was El poeta y el artista: Seamus Heaney & Jan Hendrix en Yagul. Francisco Toledo had brought Heaney to Oaxaca and introduced him to Hendrix, a Dutch artist. Hendrix had been deeply influenced by visits to Yagul, a Zapotec archaeological site, and Hierve el Agua, nearby, and took Heaney there to share the experience.

The result was the collaboration on display: The Poet and the Artist. We had marinated in Hierve el Agua just the day before, and now, on the completely opposite side of Oaxaca de Juarez, we had stumbled on a collaboration between artists of the first rank, driven by the same experience, representing where we’d just been. Minds utterly blown by the sincronicidad.

The works themselves were truly epic. Each weaving was over eight feet tall and twenty feet wide, and there were perhaps ten of them total. The exhibition space was similarly grand, and completely up to the task of presenting the pieces at their best.

What an amazing two day stretch of filling our heads with wonder. Clearly, not a sustainable pace. Some downtime has been earned.