Mexico's culinary capital — seven moles, mezcal from 40 agave species, tlayudas, chapulines, and the world's most complex living food tradition
Oaxaca de Juárez sits in the Central Valleys of southern Mexico surrounded by mountains, 1,500m above sea level, and is the cultural and gastronomic capital of a state that contains 16 distinct indigenous peoples, each with their own cuisine, language, and food tradition. Oaxacan cuisine is the most complex in Mexico (which means the most complex in the Americas): seven canonical moles (negro, colorado, amarillo, verde, chichilo, coloradito, manchamanteles), each a sauce that can contain 30+ ingredients and take two days to prepare; tlayuda (a large, hand-made corn tortilla toasted on a comal…
Oaxaca was founded as Villa de Antequera by the Spanish in 1529 on the site of the Zapotec city of Huaxyacac. The city was the birthplace of two of Mexico's most consequential presidents: Benito Juárez — an indigenous Zapotec man born in the mountain village of Guelatao in 1806 who taught himself Spanish, trained as a lawyer, and became Mexico's most revered president (separating church from state, defeating the French Intervention, and cementing Mexico's secular republican tradition) — and Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico as a modernizing dictatorship for 35 years (1876–1911) and whose overth…