There are Mexican cities that are beautiful, vibrant, historically important — and then there is Oaxaca, which manages all three simultaneously while also having the finest food in the country, a textile tradition of such antiquity the pieces are collected by museums, and a mezcal culture that has turned the agave-rich hillsides into a landscape of artisanal production so distinctive that every glass tastes of the specific soil, altitude, and agave variety that produced it. Oaxaca is the city that makes Mexico feel inexhaustible — the layers of Zapotec, Mixtec, Spanish colonial, and contemporary Indigenous culture so interwoven that separating them would destroy the thing that makes it what it is.

The Food: Seven Moles and a Tlayuda

Oaxaca is called the land of seven moles — an accurate description and a significant understatement. Mole negro, made from over thirty ingredients including dried chillies, chocolate, plantain, nuts, and spices, cooked for hours until the sauce is dark and deeply layered and slightly bitter, is the one that takes longest and produces the most profound result. Served over turkey with a warm tortilla blistered from the comal, it is the dish that makes every other sauce in every other cuisine feel like it has been thinking too small.

The tlayuda — a large, semi-crispy tortilla spread with black bean paste, asiento (unrefined pork fat), Oaxacan quesillo cheese, and grilled meat, folded in half and eaten at a street stall at ten in the evening — is one of the great street foods in a country of great street foods. The quesillo — pulled into long ribbons with a flavour between fresh mozzarella and something smokier — is the ingredient that appears in everything and improves everything it touches.

Mezcal: The Spirit That Tastes of the Land It Came From

Mezcal is made from agave — dozens of varieties, each taking seven to thirty years to mature before being harvested, roasted in an underground pit oven lined with hot rocks, fermented, and distilled. The smoke that defines the flavour comes from that roasting — a process producing a fragrance rising from the earth that smells of wood and something ancient and entirely right. Drinking mezcal in Oaxaca, at a mezcalería where the producer, village, and agave variety are all specified on the label, is drinking the landscape in concentrated form. The terroir of mezcal is as real as the terroir of wine, and understanding it changes how you think about both.

The correct approach: small pours, slowly, with an orange slice and sal de gusano — chilli and dried agave worm salt — and no hurry. The mezcal will wait. The evening will expand around it. This is the correct relationship to have with a spirit that took twenty years to produce.

Monte Albán: The City That Was Here Before All of This

Eight kilometres from the city, the ancient Zapotec centre of Monte Albán looks out over a landscape it has been watching for two and a half thousand years — pyramids, plazas, and an astronomical observatory arranged around a main plaza of such scale the valley below seems like a detail. Standing at the top of the main pyramid at sunset, when the light turns the stone golden and the mountains go blue in the distance, is the experience of understanding scale in the way only ancient places with the right light at the right hour produce.

The Textiles: The Other Thing Oaxaca Does Extraordinarily Well

The Zapotec weavers of Teotitlán del Valle, twenty kilometres from Oaxaca, produce wool textiles of extraordinary quality using natural dyes from cochineal insects, indigo, and plants cultivated in the valley for generations. The colours are vivid in the way only natural dyes produce — the red from cochineal ranging from pale rose to deep crimson depending on the mordant, the blue from indigo shifting in different lights. These textiles take weeks to produce, and the weavers of Teotitlán will explain them in as much detail as you are willing to receive.

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Oaxaca gives you more than any single visit can contain — more food, more mezcal, more craft, more history, more beauty than a week can do justice to. Go anyway. Go back. The city will still be finding new things to show you on the third visit.