In Mexico, plazas are the best place to get a window into local culture

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In Mexico, plazas are the best place to get a window into local culture

By Brian Johnston
Plazas are windows on Mexican culture, festival stages, playgrounds and meeting places, concert venues, protest platforms and much more.

Plazas are windows on Mexican culture, festival stages, playgrounds and meeting places, concert venues, protest platforms and much more.Credit: iStock

An entire afternoon and evening dawdling in a Mexican plaza is time well spent. Plazas are windows on Mexican culture, festival stages, playgrounds and meeting places, concert venues, protest platforms and much more.

Find a bench – there are always benches – and let life revolve around you, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings. Everyone is nicely dressed, ironed and beribboned. Children kick soccer balls. Shoe shiners and street vendors wander. Wedding parties spill down cathedral steps. Cafe diners eat. The plaza remains the centre for communal life in a country whose cities aren't yet overtaken by suburbia and shopping malls.

A Spanish royal decree in 1573 stated that all Mexican towns should be centred on a plaza surrounded by prominent church and government buildings. Even the smallest town has its plaza or zocalo; big cities will have several that define surrounding neighbourhoods. The granddaddy of them all is Mexico City's huge Plaza de la Constitución, which is overlooked by baroque palaces, the ruins of an Aztec temple and a gigantic, madly decorated cathedral.

Illustration: Jamie Brown

Illustration: Jamie Brown

There are lots of great plazas across the country, in Veracruz and Merida and San Miguel de Allende. Oaxaca's main square is grandly beautiful yet surprisingly intimate. Plaza Santo Domingo in Mexico City was once the place to go to get letters written; it resounded to the clack of typewriters, but now they're all gone.

Plazas are ringed by restaurants and cafes, but are also the spot to try street food. Tuck into tacos, tortillas, sandwich-like tortas and the ultimate comfort foods, pozole meat broth and caldo de gallina chicken soup.

Best of all, though, is the music. Sometimes a concert, but at all times wandering minstrels who serenade families for a peso or two. Most famous are the mariachi bands made up of singers and violin, trumpet and guitar players. Mariachi originated in western Mexico but has been influenced by European musical styles such as waltzes, polkas and fandangos.

These strolling street bands with their sequin-shimmering cowboy costumes are often lampooned in the West, but taken seriously in Mexico. Every plaza has its mariachi bands, often competing for the lucrative wedding business. It's in large part because of the music that Mexican plazas seem like sets for a Baz Luhrmann movie. Life seems slightly exaggerated, more colourful, more energetic in a plaza, and the night might end in a burst of fireworks.

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