Between magic and horror legends

It is more common to hear coyotes to see them. They stand out for their howls, squeaky, snorted, groans and even barking. Coyoacán -“Place of Coyotes”, according to its name in Nahuatl-, It only crosses us with two of those mammals, but of bronze, in The source of the Coyotes, in the Centennial Garden. However, we can listen to them magically in the most bohemian neighborhood in Mexico City.

It is enough to get carried away by the auditory illusion of that southern District of CDMX to be influenced by Sound vibration as a raging coyote. Impossible to be the same once we undergo a sound bath “Coyoaqueño”, a mixture of Organilleros, vendors offered by chapulines such as gastronomic delicacy and storytelling that put music to the most terrifying legends.

Co-yoa-snapmusic from the name, fan of noise, voices, melodies, orality, fascinating myths, but also a place where the senses are exhausted. Over -stimulus of colors, flavors, textures, smells. To feel hugged, you have to put the body to the walk with the faculties in full.

As long as one does not call him “Soroche” (Bad height that strange times can affect visitors at 2,200 meters, with dizziness, vertigo, fatigue, tachycardia), nothing better than walking light for that landscape of Low buildings, cobbled callecitas, squares with an overflowing life and somewhat deeper than the spirit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

A surreal way to start the tour is going up to Legends tramthat travels the historic center to pure gloomy fable, narrated with mastery and a shocking halo. The ticket costs 140 Mexican pesos (something like 7468 Argentine pesos).

If the passenger is lucky enough to run into a guide called Jesus, For 45 minutes you will feel within a story as creepy as adrenaline. The vocal quality of the announcer/monologuista as left from a movie by Pedro Infante delights to boys and adults.

Advancing on Aguayo Street starts one of the first legends, The Calle de Aguayo Street. The story indicates that many travelers listen to the tintineo of a coin or see their brightness. It is a curse born in those latitudes, when one Pedro returned home and found his wife, Elvira in bed. The lovers begged Peter not to kill them, and Pedro asked the man a pay for Elvira “for the service provided.”

Next, the lover launched a silver coin, Pedro kept him in the pocket of a velvet sack and stopped talking to Elvira. One day the lady throws the coin to the street and Pedro, alienated, murders Elvira. Tintineo refers to that femicide. “Who is that currency and has the bad fortune to collect it, is condemned to repeat the story. It is advised not to lift coins on Aguayo Street. “

Next chill stop: Crossing a stone bridge of the seventeenth century, there is talk of the desperate crying of a ghost woman called Natalia who “instead of eyes has two basins full of worms”says the rapportator. The lady hides a tragedy related to her three children. The ears end somewhat exhausted from so much fright and so much calamity related to bloody beings, crushed, hanged, drowned.

The luminous coyoacán is plagued with cultural centers, handicraft markets, hidden courtyards, parks populated with sellers, tarotistas and musicians with unsubscribed instruments and charming terraces decorated by flowers From where to see everything in perspective, fundamentally on celebrations such as September 15 and 16 (the independence of Mexico) and November 2, the day of the dead.

The chapel of San Antonio Panzacola, for example, at the corner of Universidad Avenue and Francisco Sosa, is a typically “instagramented” point, with great historical wealth. The picturesque word “Panzacola” refers to the abundance of lizards in the area. Even some historical buildings exhibit their lizards carved in stone in reference to this name.

Of baroque architecture, the church treasures a carved altarpiece and a Catalan vault, and is the center of two versions. Many claim that it was built by the Spanish conqueror Pedro Alvaro. Others indicate that a family of smugglers lived there and that one day the authority came to stop them, but they promised Antonio de Padua that if he were riding them from jail they would build a church (and fulfilled).

According to tradition, the authorities registered the house, but did not see the merchandise. In thanks, the family fulfilled its promise and built the temple.

If it is religious circuit, key visit The San Juan Bautista Church, which, according to the popular tradition was built by order of Hernán Cortés himself And it is one of the oldest. National Monument, the connoisseurs tell us about a temple with Tequitqui or Indochristian art, artistic manifestations of the first years of the viceroyalty in which the fusion of European iconography with formal elements of pre -Hispanic art is appreciated. The altars in cedar covered by gold leaves fascinate agnostics and believers equally.

When eating or taking, bars, canteen and restaurants flooded with Chipotle sauce and wire “warmth“, as they promote inviting the dish with pieces of meat, shellfish or roasted vegetables in a wire rod. There are also bustling taquerías with offer of drowned enchiladas in Chile sauce, or tamales and quesadillas, chilaquiles (fried tortillas or toast bathed in sauce) and arracheras (vaccine meat cut).

For dessert, between troubadours and mariachis, papalotes -sweet -echly prepared with amaranth and honey -churros and more. The special recommendation of the natives of the place: El Jarocho coffee (Cuauhtémoc 134), a cafeteria that operates since 1953.

Leaving Coyoacán without stepping on the Blue House (or Frida Kahlo Museum) is equivalent to visiting the Republic of La Boca without having passed through Caminito.

The property belonged to the Kahlo family since 1904 and opened its doors to the public four years after the artist’s death, in July 1958. Among those walls lived her parents, Matilde and Guillermo, and the painter most of her life, first with her family and years later, with Diego Rivera (1886-1957). Characters from all over the world, of the artistic and intellectual environment of the first half of the twentieth century, stayed in that house. The entrance costs 320 Mexican pesos, some 17 mil Argentines.

Another point of the Kahlo circuit is the park that bears his name, opened in 1984, after it was a vacant lot used for cattle auctions (and even a textile factory). The most important thing in this space is the three sculptures of Mexican artist Gabriel Ponzanelli, the first one that represents Frida and Diego Rivera standing; The second, Kahlo sitting on a pedestal in the form of a pyramid, and the third, a woman sitting in the center of the fountain.

Beyond the symbolic and didactic, Coyoacán should be reduced to the immersive frida experience. There are other “mandatory” museums, such as the house of León Trotsky sections of pure oxygen such as the Salvador Allende park (or Los Girasoles park), with a monument to Agustín Lara (1897-1970), the singer of Veracruz who had One of the most extensive names in the world, Ángel Agustín María Carlos Fausto Mariano Alfonso of the Sacred Heart of Jesús Lara and Aguirre del Pino.

In Coyoacán there is a simplistic game that is difficult not to adhere: try to pronounce street names, such as Xochicatitla, Xicoténcatl, Moctezuma. Overdose of consonants. This “hotbed of talents” as described by writer Elena Poniatowska to one of the sixteen territorial demarcations in Mexico City, allows memories of carved wood, fabrics, embroidery, necklaces and silver bracelets, but above all an indelible souvenir, the sensation between drowning and emotion.

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