Durango

Durango, officially Victoria de Durango, is the capital and largest city of the Mexican state of Durango. I spent a few days there together with Jonathan on our hitchhiking tour in Northern Mexico. We were really lucky to stay with Edgar who was an excellent host picking us up as well as Brenda, Karla, Jackie and Caro who showed us around the city. Amongst others, Durango is known for its alacranes (scorpions).

The word alacrán, registered in Spanish since the 13th century, comes from the Arabic áqrab. As Durango is very mountainous and rocky and has a hot and dry climate, it is an ideal place to live for scorpions. In many markets or restaurants in Durango alacranes are sold, served as exquisite dishes. As the alacranes are soaked in alcohol before preparing them, the taste isn't as crunchy anymore but very much like Mezcal (alcohol). These scorpions are nowadays often not anymore collected in the desert but bred in glass or plastic containers. Depending on their type of scorpion they can be very poisonous. That's why their venomous sting is removed before. Alacranes are not only sold on plates but also in form of various sweets, powdered and mixed with salt, inside Mezcal bottles or in clocks or simply as a decoration for walls.

Jonathan and I arrived in Durango in the night, walking the last kilometers after we hitchhiked twice. The next day we started exploring downtown Durango with Brenda and Karla and also at night they showed us around some of the most trendy bars in the city.

One morning our host Edgar visited the Parque Fundidora de Ferrería and the Ex Hacienda La Ferrería de Flores with us. This park surrounds the ancient ruins of the forge foundry, which produced iron in stone ovens for many years. The corresponding hacienda is nowadays a museum showing many objects from the last centuries, some of them replicas.

In the evening of the 2nd of May, the international day of jazz music, we visited a jazz concert in the Teatro Victoria, one of the two theatres in town. The 4tet Neal Smith, Diego Franco, Benjamin Garcia and Dulce Resillas provided us with varied jazz variations throughout the evening.

Like a lot of Mexican cities Durango also offers a cable car which brings you up the Cerro de Los Remedios, a small hill within the city and the best point to get an overview of Durango. The dimensions are not spectacular, just 750 meters length and a height of 82 meters which can be overcome in the cable car. Nevertheless the trip is worth its money thanks to the very reasonable ticket price.

Before leaving Durango we visited one of the multitude of museums which Durango offers. We decided for the museum of Pancho Villa. Francisco "Pancho" Villa was a Mexican revolutionary general. For loyal supporters of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, Pancho was a bloodthirsty bandit, but for the majority of the population at the time he was the Mexican "Robin Hood".

We furthermore did two small excursions from Durango, one to the Mezcalería Mr. Mares and the Pueblo Mágico Nombre de Dios and another one to the Paseo del Viejo Oeste, a genuine village of the wild west, which served as a film location for numerous western movies. I will publish two short extra articles regarding these two places soon.