Heart of Día de Muertos — the Purépecha lakeside town in Michoacán where Mexico's most authentic Day of the Dead celebrations have taken place on Janitzio Island since pre-Columbian times, 16th-century colonial architecture frames the plazas, and Purépecha craft traditions survive in the surrounding villages
Pátzcuaro is a small colonial-era town on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán — one of Mexico's Pueblos Mágicos and the epicentre of Mexico's most culturally authentic Día de Muertos celebration. While Mexico's Day of the Dead has been adopted worldwide (fuelled by the film Coco and Oaxaca's commercialised version), Pátzcuaro's version — especially on Janitzio Island in the lake — retains its pre-Columbian Purépecha (P'urhépecha) origins: on the night of November 1st–2nd, fishermen cross the lake by torchlight in canoe processions, families gather at cemetery islands to place marigold-c…
Lake Pátzcuaro and its surrounding basin was the heartland of the Purépecha (Tarascan) civilisation — a Mesoamerican state contemporary with the Aztec Triple Alliance but linguistically unrelated (Purépecha has no known relatives among any other language family). The Taráscan Empire at its peak (14th–15th centuries) stretched across most of modern Michoacán, resisting every Aztec military attempt to conquer it; the Aztec-Tarascan border at the Lerma River was one of the most fortified frontiers in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The capital Tzintzuntzan (15 km from Pátzcuaro on Lake Pátzcuaro's no…