Oaxaca, Mexico · North America

7 ideal things to do in Oaxaca

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked October 26, 2025

1. 01

   Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca

   Behind Santo Domingo; gate on Reforma at Constitución·Tours run to a fixed schedule — check the gate a day ahead

   Francisco Toledo proposed this in 1993 and the anthropologist Alejandro de Ávila laid out the planting, and the result is not decorative in the slightest. Agaves in rows by species. The nopal that hosts the cochineal insect that dyed half of Europe's cloth. Maize varieties, dye plants, timber, the entire material basis of the state standing inside one walled hectare behind the convent. Two hours here and the Tlacolula market stops being picturesque and starts being an economy you can read.

2. 02

   Mitla

   44 km east, past Tlacolula·Pair it with the Sunday market — market first, ruins after

   Thousands of cut stones fitted into geometric friezes with no mortar at all, and no panel repeating exactly anywhere on the site, which is the Zapotec and Mixtec answer to the question of what a wall is for. Then the Spanish set a church straight down on the main platform in the sixteenth century and used the platform as its atrium, so the two arguments stand there touching. About five hundred people a day come; it deserves more. Bring your reading glasses — the fretwork is the point and it is small.

3. 03

   El Árbol del Tule

   Santa María del Tule, 9 km east of the city·Fifteen minutes, on the way to Mitla or Tlacolula

   A Montezuma cypress in a churchyard with a trunk forty-two metres around. That is the entire attraction and it is completely sufficient. Local kids will offer to point out the animals people claim to see in the bark, which is the best-run small business in the state and worth the coins. The tree was already old when Monte Albán was being abandoned. The church standing next to it, a perfectly respectable colonial church, has been reduced by proximity to the status of a shed.

4. 04

   Museo Textil de Oaxaca

   Hidalgo 917, four minutes from the zócalo·Late morning; it is cool inside

   Seven thousand pieces in a restored colonial house: huipiles, rebozos, backstrap weaving from villages up in the sierra, and international textiles kept alongside for comparison rather than decoration. It opened in 2008 and is run with unusual seriousness — small rotating shows, honest labels, no attempt to shame you into buying anything. Come here before you go to Teotitlán for a rug and you will understand what you are looking at, and pay more, and be right to.

5. 05

   Centro Cultural San Pablo

   Hidalgo 907, next door to the textile museum·Any afternoon, when the sun is doing its worst

   Oaxaca's first Dominican convent was founded in 1529, then swallowed by four centuries of shops, walls and additions, then dug back out and rebuilt into a cultural centre that opened in 2011. The restoration deliberately left the seams showing: sixteenth-century stone, twentieth-century brick and new steel all readable in the same elevation. Exhibitions on indigenous languages, concerts, a courtyard roofed in glass. With the textile museum next door it makes one very good hot afternoon.

6. 06

   Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad

   Independencia, four blocks west of the cathedral·Evening, when the front is lit

   Deliberately low, this one — built between 1682 and 1690 by a city that shakes and had already watched its tall churches prove the point. Green stone body, yellow stone front, and a facade carved in the 1710s like a folding screen: three tiers of saints in niches around a relief of the Virgin kneeling at the foot of the cross. The image inside wears a crown carrying two kilos of gold and six hundred diamonds. Devotion here includes the earthquake engineering, and I find that a serious kind of faith.

7. 07

   Walk the barrio of Jalatlaco

   East of the centre, across the Periférico·Early evening, midweek

   Founded in the early sixteenth century as a separate Nahua town and only swallowed by the city much later, which is why the street pattern refuses to line up with the grid and the cobbles are the real thing rather than a restoration. It has become the neighbourhood everyone photographs, so come on a weekday at dusk when it reverts to being where people live — doors open, a football game, somebody's radio. Twenty minutes' walk from the zócalo and an entirely different century of town planning.