Arriving in Bernal, Pueblo Mágico

| Peña de Bernal, photo by C. Enns |

The bus pulls to the side of the main thoroughfare. We hop off, get the bags from beneath the bus. Bernal in the afernoon is a sunny and hot pueblo. We must look terribly touristy, with packs on our backs. We say buen día to ancianos and young couples and kids in the doorways of cinder block houses and little misceláneas full of chips and aguas frescas. A slow car bumps by. This is a pueblo mágico and a tourist destination for lots of Mexicanos, but here on the outer shoulder of the old centro with the beautiful church, this is a village of crumbling walls.

We arrive at our gate, and Ruperto and Alicia let us in. AirB&B, modern, new, mid-century, expert paving and brickwork creating appealing designs down the paths and up the landscaped steps up to more courtyards outlined with beautifully constructed walls artfully mortared in. A walkway of railroad ties and pea gravel leads to our place. The guest apartment itself is brand new with lots of modern Ikea touches and full of windows to take in the view of the Peña, the giant, freestanding, monolithic rock to the northwest. From the patio and from the expansive windows, the mountain, left when the rest of the soft earth around it slowly eroded away through millions of years, reaches up into the afternoon blue sky.

We are feeling pampered. The hosts are attentive, tiny Alicia outside in crisp new pinstriped apron, cutting blue plumbago blooms for the kitchen tables of guests, The resident dog, Bertón, a scroungy and cute Dutch Shepherd, bounds over with his fetch toy.

| Gorditas in Bernal, photo by C. Enns |

We settle in. Later in the evening we stroll down the cobbled lanes and into the little magical square centered around El Templo de San Sebastián, the beautiful salmon-colored church too small to warrant the flying buttresses of its sides. We stop in at a gordita place on the square, the one with the local ladies making them by hand on a wood stove. They pat the blue corn masa, then stuff the doubled tortillas with nopales or champiñones and huitlacoche. In the inner courtyard we enjoy our dinner, spooning in red and green spicy salsas and sipping micheladas from plastic cups with spicy red rims.

Then we wander through the church square, following a rowdy group of local teenagers until they disappear into a panadería. We head back up the hill and home to our place overlooking the city. In the darkness, the occasional dog barks. The donkey on the other side of the wall brays. In the northwest is the giant shadow of the Peña, in the east pinpoints of yellow light glimmering in the little village below. Occasional bombas pop in the night sky until midnight, then all is quiet.