Atlixco

Atlixco grows the country's flowers. Blessed with what locals unblushingly call the best climate in the world - warm, frost-free and irrigated by Popocatepetl's snows - the town and its valley run hundreds of nurseries and greenhouses that ship poinsettias, marigolds, azaleas and bedding plants across Mexico; entire barrios smell like a florist's cold room. The pueblo magico center climbs from a jacaranda-shaded zocalo of Talavera-trimmed arcades toward the Cerro de San Miguel, whose stations-of-the-cross stair ends at a little chapel with the classic full-length portrait of Popocatepetl - close enough here to fill half the sky, smoking obligingly for photographs. Seasons set the calendar: marigold fields blaze before Day of the Dead, the Villa Iluminada strings a winter avenue of lights, poinsettia weeks turn the valley red, and September's Huey Atlixcayotl festival gathers Puebla's indigenous delegations for dance on the hill. Weekend visitors add cecina - Atlixco's famed salted beef - to the reasons.

What you actually see

• The nurseries - flower fields and greenhouse lanes by the hundred.
• Cerro de San Miguel - the chapel stair with the volcano portrait.
• The zocalo - jacarandas, arcades and Talavera details.
• The seasonal spectacles - marigolds, poinsettias and the illuminated village.

When to go

Late October for marigold fields, December for poinsettias and lights, spring for jacarandas - the town cycles its colors. Clear dry-season mornings serve the volcano view best.

Honest expectations

Big festival weekends jam the center and the hill stair. The volcano hides in cloud by most middays - climb early. Between spectacles, Atlixco is a pleasant market town rather than a monument city.

Nearby

Puebla's centro, the Tonantzintla church and the Popocatepetl monasteries at Huaquechula and Tochimilco are all under an hour.