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.