A Bit of the Divine Found in Tepoztlan, Mexico

Unless you have Aztecs in your family tree, you might find this city’s name hard to pronounce. But so much else about the city is easy, or irresistible. The Aztec echoes, the steam baths, the ice cream, the pyramid, even the corn smut.

Tepoztlan - pronounced teh-pose-LAWN - is a smallish city in a lush valley rimmed by mountains that appear to have been smuggled out of a Chinese landscape painting. At its center, a 16th-century convent and church rise above a marketplace full of locals making tortillas, nibbling on fried grasshoppers and licking locally concocted sherbets.

Just north of town stands Tepozteco, the pyramid built on a mountaintop by the Aztecs about 700 years ago to honor Tepoztecatl, god of fertility and pulque, also known as Aztec moonshine.”*

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