Last week I met a new friend, Rachel, a food historian here in Mexico who blogs about all sorts of interesting things, such as what couscous must have been like in Mexico in the 1800s. (I’m fascinated by her blog.) She invited me for coffee down in her neighborhood, Chimalistac.
I was excited. I was looking forward to meeting Rachel, and I’d never heard of Chimalistac before. Perhaps it was near Tecamachalco, the other hard-to-pronounce colonia with a prehispanic name?
Turns out, no. Chimalistac is next to San Angel, south of the center of town, near the Metrobus La Bombilla stop. And as for me not knowing about it — I’m sure that if I lived there I’d want to keep it to myself, too, lest tourists start crowding the streets and gawking at the ornately carved front-doors. (Yes, I did this.)
Chimalistac feels like a far-flung pueblo. It’s leafy and quiet, with cobblestone streets, colonial churches and flowering bushes that leave their petals all over the road. In prehispanic times, the neighborhood was called Temalistac, meaning “the place where sacrificial stones are made.” Supposedly the famous Aztec sun stone was made there.
The land eventually became part of San Angel’s Carmelite convent. You can still see bridges the friars constructed from lava rocks, over what used to be a river. (The river is now a dirt path.)
It’s funny, because being so close to San Angel, you’d think Chimalistac would have a similar high-end, upscale type of character. It doesn’t. There are no fancy stores or hip young people dining at sidewalk cafes. It’s just… a quiet residential neighborhood. A really lovely one. That also happens to be extremely close to Insurgentes and the Metrobus.
After we walked around the neighborhood, Rachel and I sat in her garden and drank agua de guayaba. It was so quiet that you could actually hear the breeze. This was a little jarring. Tranquilidad in Mexico City? I thought at the very least I’d be able to hear the Metrobus’s puny Roadrunner-sounding horn. But no. There were no traffic sounds. No horns. No nothing.
Chimalistac is now on my list of “Places to Buy a Home and Live Forever and Ever.”
More pictures below.
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