Day 7 — In Which There Are Very Old Churches

Well, there we were, on vaca­tion, tak­ing a cou­ple of days off for fire­works and parades. But that’s all over and only the con­fet­ti and red, white, and green bunting are left. So it was time to get mov­ing again.

Out to the Mix­te­ca. Once the cen­ter of cochineal pro­duc­tion and the Span­ish Empire’s new world eco­nom­ic engine. Now a sleepy agri­cul­tur­al back­wa­ter.  The last time we were out here it was Feb or Mar — the height of the dry sea­son. The hills were spec­tac­u­lar­ly red. Now it’s Sep­tem­ber and the end of the rainy sea­son. every­thing is green and growing.

We start­ed with the old­est and largest of the colo­nial church­es. Yanhuitlan.

There has been a lot going on in the church. Inte­ri­or restora­tions, roof repair, stonework.
The huge retablo are being moved away from the walls and restored from the back out.

Some of the details are inspir­ing. Like this nat­ty fellow.

Much of the stone work is repairs — done in such a way as to pre­serve as much of the exist­ing work as can be saved and them adding new work that looks like the orig­i­nal would have 450 years ago.

Yan­huit­lan was once the cen­ter of the Domini­can’s pow­er and the church prob­a­bly seem more in scale 400 years ago.  But now Yan­huit­lan is a farm­ing vil­lage and the church looks like a UFO hangar dropped into the mid­dle of Iowa.

We took a lit­tle dri­ve out of the vil­lage to find a spot to take that pic­ture. We met a cou­ple of charm­ing folks who were pleased to make some new friends. Even if we were a lit­tle odd. (And not Catholic, but Nico, who is, was hap­py to accept their gift of a milagro.)

We talked a lit­tle about the weath­er and a lit­tle about where we were from and a bit about the bean crop. Jim took this pic­ture of their farm yard from the top of the hill.

We moved fur­ther out from Oax­a­ca to Coixt­lahuac and anoth­er church that is near­ly as old. This church is small­er and in much more fre­quent con­tem­po­rary use.

The inte­ri­or is still bright­ly paint­ed. This is part of the arch­way around the entrance to a side chapel.

Oth­er parts of the clois­ter haven’t fared as well as the main church but there is restora­tion work in progress.

This stair­way was fea­tured in a PSA for the fed­er­al arche­ol­o­gy and his­to­ry institute.