Puebla, Mexico

Destinations worth traveling to and understanding once you arrive

Calling it the next Oaxaca undersells this city

If you have traveled Mexico beyond the beaches, you probably know the places on either side of Puebla better than Puebla itself. It is the day tour that has you back in Mexico City by dinner, and it is the city the road to Oaxaca runs through.

Puebla is worth not only a much longer visit but a trip in itself. Some recent travel guides have started calling it the next Oaxaca. UNESCO listed the old center in 1987, and what it singled out was the decoration: 2,619 cataloged buildings across 391 blocks, many of them faced in brick, tile and white stucco relief. The things worth seeing are close together, and some of the best hotels are inside restored colonial houses.

The stall in La Acocota

Michelin sent inspectors to Puebla for the first time this year. Fourteen places made the 2026 guide, eight of them Bib Gourmands, the category for good food at a fair price. One of the eight is a stall inside the Mercado La Acocota, where María de la Luz Pérez Rocha and her husband, Rodrigo Conde Serrano, have been making cemitas for more than 37 years. A cemita is a sesame roll split and filled with milanesa, shredded quesillo, avocado, and pápalo (like cilantro), and it is what the city eats for lunch.

Mole poblano and chiles en nogada are the famous dishes. Everyday foods include cemitas, chalupas, and molotes. Tacos árabes originated with Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived in the early twentieth century, bringing the vertical spit, which locals adapted and later used to make tacos al pastor.

The mark on the base

The famous Talavera ceramic covers domes and house fronts throughout the center. The clay comes from the valley, and potters make the pieces using techniques dating to the colonial period. The denominación de origen, the same sort of protection that limits what may be called Champagne or tequila, recognizes six colors, all ground from minerals: blue, yellow, green, orange, black, and a pale violet. A certified piece is left unglazed on the base, where the workshop’s mark, the painter’s initials, and the city are inscribed. It is always interesting to turn a piece over.

Only eight workshops hold the certification. Uriarte, certified and in business since 1824, runs tours most days.

Across from the cathedral, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana turned 380 this month. It holds more than 45,000 volumes on the carved wooden shelving lining the room. Work on the Capilla del Rosario, inside the Templo de Santo Domingo, began in 1650 and finished in 1690, with gilded stucco covering the walls and vaults, and it was called the eighth wonder of the New World.

The hill at Cholula

Cholula, ten minutes west and now effectively a suburb, is centuries older than Puebla. Its Great Pyramid holds 4.45 million cubic meters, nearly twice the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Earth and grass have made the site look like a hill with a church on top. On a clear morning, Popocatépetl can be seen behind it, 45 kilometers away. The volcano erupted again in December 1994, after about fifty years of quiet, and has remained active ever since.

A few minutes away is the church that makes the trip worth taking. Local artisans did the interior at Santa María Tonantzintla, working across generations, and they filled it with angels with dark skin, cherubs wearing feathers in their hair, ears of corn, papayas, and chiles worked into the plaster.

Buses from Mexico City run throughout the day and take about two hours, and Puebla has its own airport half an hour from the center, with nonstop flights from Houston, Los Angeles, and Newark, and Chicago added on December 1.