Patzcuaro

Our visit to Patzcuaro was somewhat fortuitous. It was early in our 2008 trip driving round Central Mexico picking up as many inscribed and T List sites as we could in 17 days. It wasn’t planned as a WHS-related objective and I wasn’t aware that “The Lake Patzcuaro Cultural Zone” was a former T List site, let alone that it had been nominated in 1987 and deferred before being removed. We were driving from Morelia towards Guadalajara and the town and its lakeside villages seemed “interesting” as per LP’s descriptions and were not much “out of the way”! In fact, we were so “taken” with the town that we stayed overnight and “paid” for that with a very early start the next day on the remaining 270 km motorway drive to Guadalajara.

After Morelia, which, IMO, doesn’t really exude “Colonial town” ambience, it was the first of many we were to see which did! It was still very much a “town” rather than a city, with plenty of “indigeno” atmosphere/people, and almost totally vernacular architecture, but with no really outstanding or memorable buildings . What did stick very much in our memory was a magnificent mural from 1942 by Juan O’Gorman titled “The History of Michoacan”. This is located in a building now called the “Gertrudis Bocanegra Public Library” which had been constructed as an Augustine Convent in 1576, converted to secular use in 1880 and turned into a library/cultural centre by the …