In my infinite restlessness, I've been organizing a bunch of day trips and stuff like that to various strange and obscure places in México, called "Expediciones Culturales!" (with a mandatory exclamation point). Basically, I put the call out to travel to a place for the day, we meet up in a place, and then take the bus to a previously unknown place! The first one was to the Pyramid of Cholula, and the most recent one was to TONANTZINTLA, a small pueblo on the outskirts of Puebla.
It's known for it's church...
The church is pretty much unique in México, because it is one of the very few NOT designed by Spanish artisans. The Spanish conquistadores, for some reason that I'm not sure of, put the indios of this pueblo in charge of building this church.
So, instead of building the traditional heaven over the altar scheme, the indios were told to build what THEY thought heaven/paradise was like. It turned out like this. We were not allowed to take photos inside, so I'll have to use some others:
If you notice, it's not all about angels and stuff like that, even though it looks like it at first glance. Instead of angels and God, the indios put little children, according to their belief that the afterworld consisted of being reborn as a little kid; life's most innocent age.
This was about half of the group.
Later we headed over to San Francisco Acatepec, another pueblo pretty close to Tonantzintla. I don't have so much history about this one, but the architecture speaks for itself...
Beautiful inside, beautiful outside.
We were lucky enough to happen upon a wedding, complete with mariachis, bolo ties, and wedding cake. Really an amazing treat.
That's all for now, thanks for reading!!!
Cullen, Awsome post! great photos!
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