Once Acapulco was a remote and glamorous resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Mass tourism from abroad and from within the country has changed all that.
Now it should be enjoyed more for the vitality and vulgarity of a latin Blackpool or Coney Island: plates of fried bananas and whelks; rubber rings and trinkets in brash colours; kids dashing under the waves or burying themselves under the brownish sand (no one can claim Acapulco has the purest water in the Pacific – a million people live there). Along the central drag is a large, kitsch statue of a plump Diana firing her arrow directly at a gigantic inflated bottle of Corona. Overhead, frigate birds try to mob the boobies and the gulls to get them to disgorge their fish.
I like best the old working fishermen’s beach at the north end of the shore, near the fort once used to keep the area free from English pirates like El Drago (Drake). There the pelicans cluster round the catches, hopping from foot to foot like embarrassed teenagers at a ball waiting to be asked to dance. These are not the picturesque Disney white pelicans of further north and California, but the brown ones of the Latin American seaport, with their ponderous heavy-jowled flight.
The drink of choice for the locals is not tequila – that’s for the norteños or the American college kids who come here for their ‘Spring Break’ to party hard in the surf. No the drink here is the michelada, a light beer with salt and lime on the rim of the glass, and a dusting of chilli powder to give more power to your elbow. The more of it you drink, the more of it you need to drink.
I have one on the old fishing pier, watching the pelicans clustering together on a buoy and looking down the strip towards the gleaming high-rise hotels at the south end of the shore, now half empty with all the talk of Mexican drug crime (20 were killed in a nearby Acapulco suburb recently). And then I have another.
Postscript: and for those doubting that Acapulco has been infected by Mexican drug crime, see this more recent report
I go to the British Museum to hear Leonardo López Luján talk about his work on the Aztec pyramids of the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City. There is an almost palpable air of expectation about the event — after several years of excavation, his team have reached the entrance to what may well be a royal tomb. The glyphs on the doorway correspond to those for the reign of Ahuizotl, Moctezuma’s predecessor as Emperor of the Aztecs (or Mexica, as the British Museum keeps pedantically reminding us to call them).
Even the natural — and proper — caution of an archaeologist cannot prevent Leonardo from getting excited at the prospect. And he’s had three years to do so — the monolithic lid to the tomb was first uncovered in October 2006 (by workmen clearing the wrong site by accident). The reason it’s taken so long to excavate is that the water table is very high in what was once, after all, a city built on a lake, like Venice.
The tomb lid showed a representation of the nocturnal earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli carved into the pink andesite, with claws extended to receive the dead. Ground-penetrating radar shows there are three chambers below the tomb lid. Funerary offerings placed at the entrance to these chambers include gold offerings, the bones of an eagle and a dog, and the pelt of a spider monkey.
The moment when the tomb is finally opened may well be the first really momentous archaeological find of the 21st century: no tomb of an Aztec emperor has ever been found before. And it will happen soon.
see Mexico City Dreams The Traveller Magazine
a fine exhibition, but raises some issues about how indulgently we view the Aztecs and in particular their practice of widespread human sacrifice. as I pointed out in the Times in a piece on Moctezuma, the Aztec dictator.
Also raises the question of how while this is the third big Mexico London show in 15 years, the British Museum – or any other gallery in London – has had no show on the Incas or any of the Peruvian civilisations in living memory. The British Museum does not even have a gallery devoted to South America – the only two in the ‘Americas’ section are devoted to North America and Mexico respectively. Which is something that Director Neil MacGregor needs to address.
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