Tapalpa

Tapalpa sits at 2,000 metres in the Sierra Madre del Sur's Jalisco arm, and it looks the part: whitewashed houses under red tile, wooden balconies and columned portales around a plaza where two churches stand side by side - one a roofless eighteenth-century shell left as a monument, the other in use. The town was among Mexico's first pueblos magicos and it has leaned into the weekend-mountain role with rustic hotels, cheese and rompope shops, birria and borrego al pastor kitchens, and stalls selling ponche and preserves. The country outside supplies the activities: the Valle de los Enigmas, better known as Las Piedrotas, is a meadow scattered with enormous rounded boulders, some ten metres tall, that visitors climb and picnic among; the Salto del Nogal, one of Jalisco's tallest waterfalls at over a hundred metres, drops in a canyon nearby; and the pine ridges carry paragliding, ATV routes, horse trails and rock climbing. Nights are cold, wood smoke hangs in the lanes, and the whole place empties pleasantly midweek.

History

The name comes from the Nahuatl tlapalpan, "land of colours". The Spanish under Alonso de Ávalos Saavedra reached the area in 1523 and Franciscan friars arrived in 1531; Tapalpa was a registered town by 1825 and a municipality in 1869, and the first paper factory in Latin America opened here in 1840, its ruins now a sight for visitors (Wikipedia, Tapalpa).

What's there

• The portales - timber columns and balconies on the plaza.
• The roofless church - the old shell kept as monument.
• Las Piedrotas - the meadow of giant boulders.
• Salto del Nogal - the hundred-metre canyon waterfall.

When to go

October to May for crisp, dry mountain weather; weekdays for quiet. Weekends and holidays fill the town with Guadalajara families.

What to expect

It is a weekend-tourism town first - expect quad bikes, hotel prices and organized fun rather than untouched village life. Nights are genuinely cold; not every hotel heats well. Roads in are winding.

Nearby

Lake Chapala lies two hours east; Ciudad Guzman and the Nevado de Colima's slopes are south.

Key facts