If you are planning a trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas, make sure your shoes have good grip and your lungs are ready. This town is incredibly beautiful, but it is also sitting high in the mountains and built on a serious incline. Between the altitude and the constant hills, just walking around for a day feels like a massive leg workout.
We started our morning the right way, with breakfast at our hotel right on the Guadalupe pedestrian strip. Fueling up turned out to be a great decision because the climbing started immediately after. To work off our meal, we headed straight for the Iglesia de Guadalupe. Getting up to the church requires tackling a massive flight of stairs, but once you get to the top, you get a view of the red-tiled roofs and the mountains surrounding the town.
From there, we walked all the way across town to tackle the biggest hike of the day at the Moxviquil natural reserve. This is where things got seriously intense. It is a tough, rough hike that forces you to navigate a crazy, relentless incline and uneven terrain for well over two kilometers. When you combine that rocky ground with the thin air at this altitude, every single step requires real effort. We kept pushing up and up into the green hills to find the orchid sanctuary and the cave. Seeing the orchids growing out in nature and exploring the cave area made the long trek worth it, even if we were definitely gasping for air by the time we reached them.
We hiked all the way back down into town, but our legs did not get much of a break. By the time evening rolled around, we were walking up and down the steep streets yet again just to get to our dinner spot.
San Cristóbal is such a unique and special place. It forces you to take your time, catch your breath, and really earn every view and every meal. Our legs were completely dead by the time we went to sleep, but it was an unforgettable day.
“Some lessons are best served neat.”
—Nurit