Posts filed under 'Querétaro'
Zacatecas and Puebla are the only 2 locations on this list of Colonial Gems from last Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle that Livtopia is not currently listing. We will be. Puebla we should be announcing in the next few weeks. Zacatecas is the focus of huge government investments in new hospitals and infrastructure, according to this December Reforma article, (in Spanish/Registration required) and we should have someone on the ground there by the end of this spring.
The full list of colonial Mexican cities from the San Francisco Chronicle is as follows (I left their handy links to the local tourist bureaus as well):
- Mérida
- Morelia
- Campeche
- Oaxaca
- Puebla
- Guanajuato
- Cuernavaca
- Querétaro
- Zacatecas
- Veracruz
When you visit just a few of them it is easy to see why Mexico’s tourist revenues were up so sharply last year.
January 27th, 2008
When I mentioned Vergel de la Pena, near Bernal in Querétaro, to a Mexican friend, I never thought I would get such a response. We talked it over and he ended up making a list of what he thought were the best reasons to consider building a house there. Jose Merino writes a regular column on international politics for Excelsior, the Mexican daily, and blogs about films at Victimas del Pecado.
I had the chance to go to Bernal pretty often while I was growing up and I’ve found myself going back more times than I ever thought I would. I can think of 10 good reasons that it’s a good place to consider for retirement or a second home or whatever:
10. Bernal is at the entrance to the Sierra Gorda Mountain Range in the state of Querétaro. This stretch of mountains, half desert and half forest, goes on for miles and miles with dozens of beautiful towns, churches and natural attractions.
9. The town of Bernal itself, is old, pretty, and amazingly well taken care of. It’s a bit better than what you’d think a tourist town looks like.
8. It’s 30 minutes from the city of Querétaro, 40 minutes from San Miguel de Allende, and 30 minutes from Tequisquiapan and lots of swimming and recreation, resort and vacation areas.
7. Bernal’s natural landscape is startlingly beautiful,the encounter point of the valleys of Mexico’s Bajio and the desert.
6. Bernal offers a surprising variety of amazing Mexican handcraft, local food (the cheese is pretty famous) and fancy restaurants.
5. Bernal’s inhabitants are friendly and quiet, they truly reflect the mood of the town and they are famous across Mexico for their longevity. It’s not unusual to pass by “90- somethings” in the streets there.
4. Bernal offers almost anything you might need without renouncing the feeling of a very small town. And in case you don’t find something, Ezequiel Montes almost certainly does and it’s only 10 minutes away. (see the map).
3. Bernal has one of the most amazing natural treasures in the continent the ‘Peña de Bernal‘, the second largest rock in the world after Ayer’s Rock in Australia, and the third in height behind the Rock of Gibralter. and Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain
2. Bernal is in one of the most developed states in the country, Querétaro. The city of Querétaro has been classified as the most economically prosperous city in the country and as the 3rd most competitive city in the Latin America. It offers quality public services, nice roads and medical services and an international airport which is only 15 minutes away from Bernal!
1. My number one reason though, is that Bernal and the developments around it, including Vergel de la Pena, are not over-developed. This is ranchero country, and the way of life is centered around farming and ranch life. It’s a region famous for a lot of things, but it offers easy access to the very heart of Mexico just to the south, and all the convenience of Querétaro city without the frenetic pace every day.
April 11th, 2007
I remember being in my early 20s the first time I visited places like Phoenix and Tucson and the Red Rocks of Sedona, Arizona. It was really quite magical to me that all these easterners were enjoying their sandy gardens and carving oases out of deserts here. Novel in an 80s sort of way. As much as anything, it was the juxtaposition of personalities from upstate New York, Ohio, people from Delaware, with these surroundings. Surroundings that suggest not so much the moon or a spaghetti western as they do a kind of freedom that people were really just learning back then.
I felt similar when I first visited San Miguel de Allende some ten years later. People were all stretching out, experiencing some kind of living that was not only novel but practical and different every day. It’s not that every day is a challenge or more difficult. But without winter, it is like everyday became more reasonable, bigger challenges could be reached, imagined, even just sought after.
Bernal is on the other side of Querétaro. It’s quite a bit smaller than San Miguel, but it is not just a spot on the map either. Residents enjoy the same great restaurants and atmosphere, but have to travel a wee bit further for things like hardware and appliance repair. Further meaning to Ezelequiel Montes about 15 minutes to the south. Querétaro is a very different state from neighboring Guanajuato. The richest state in the nation, Querétaro prides itself on first world administration, neat smooth roads and efficient delivery of services. Bernal, though, is on the Hidalgo side of Querétaro, where the landscape starts to tend toward the surreal and the otherworldly.
This is second in a series of posts about life near Vergel de la Pena. The photo above is from the town of Bernal.
April 4th, 2007
Some readers here will know exactly where this is… to me it is almost too easy to get to. Bernal is just 2 hours North from Mexico City, 30 mins from the City of Queretaro and only 40 minutes from San Miguel de Allende. From the US, Continental and Aeromexico both have regular flights into Queretaro’s International Airport, connecting in Houston.
Bernal is one of the most picturesque little mining towns in all Mexico. There is lots to say about it. So this will give you an idea of what’s coming up this week.
April 2nd, 2007
Just because you retire to Mexico, already a great travel and tourism destination, doesn’t mean you end up traveling any less. Seems every blog I turned to this weekend had more travel stories.
Mamahop records the family adventures Hopalog Travels around Veracruz from Xico to Xalapa and places in between. Similar meanderings were recorded at Viva Veracruz.
Flor y Canto provided great advice on getting to Atla and San Pablito in the Sierra de Puebla from Mexico City. It’s a bit of a trek and Flor y Canto’s new blog looks terrific.
Gwyn from Guadalajara took off for Tulum so you’ll want to keep an eye on his Flickr page. We’re expecting more great photos to show up there.
And who knew there are Two Tequisquipans? John’s excellent Mexico Woods blog explores them both, with terrific photography and I agree on choosing the second in Querétaro state, though he followed up today with still more to consider as far as hotels, water and food.
February 26th, 2007
Billie from Billieblog, helpfully points out that it is important to check the website for traffic reports at both border crossings, either at Laredo or at the Columbia crossing. You can do so here, at the CBP.gov border wait times web-site and then decide which crossing seems best.
The reason the friend with whom I was driving and I were talking about writing a series of blog-posts about the drive is that we noticed we had quite a bit of confusion finding our way back south. Following signs for Monterrey is easy enough, but after that is where we ran into some, well, confusion, if not actual trouble.
From Monterrey you want to follow signs leading you to Saltillo on highway 57, but from there, nothing indicates the direction points further south like San Luis Potosi or Querétaro, much less Mexico City herself. The road you want to follow is 57D to Matehuala, and though I could be wrong, that is the only sign we saw indicating a city south between Saltillo and San Luis Potosi.
Also we had some confusion about whether we were ever actually on the Cuota highway. Generally the Cuota highways are better and faster than the Libre highways, but even if we were on the Libre road, it was fast and offered spectacular scenery and a near perfect surface the whole way. We saved a little on tolls though in general we do reccomend the Cuota roads.
The Secretary of Communications and Transport offers a reasonably good route planning section of their website that might give you some tips for these or other destinations. You’ll need a reasonably good handle on the Spanish language and certainly, better than average knowledge of what cities are in what states.
The best thing about the website is that they give you an itemized account of mileage, travel time and tolls. The map they will generate for your trip leaves a lot to the imagination and is not particularly easy to navigate, but it can give you a general idea of the trip. That map, in combination with the perfectly good Guia Roji maps available everywhere along Mexico highways should be enough to get you where you’re going. The strangely outdated logo of Guia Roji appears here, but notice that the blindfolded traveller seems to be trusting the Guia Roji completely and voluntarily. I’d suggest that without a blindfold, and the Guia Roji in the vicinity of your front seat, you should do just fine.
February 18th, 2007
Maybe we come sort of down the list of people hailing the great reasons to live in or retire to Mexico. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has done a pretty good job of recognizing some of Mexico’s most spectacular historical and cultural places. They call them UNESCO World Heritage Sites. If you’re from a larger country, sometimes this sort of recognition seems to mean a lot less. But it you ever get a chance to visit any of these places, in Mexico, or anywhere in the world, you’ll see instantly why they are so important, so worth protecting, and why people keep talking about them.
Among the many which you can see in the page linked above are some of the best places we recommend for retirement. This is a list of those that correspond to our list of Featured Locations:
- Historic Town of Guanajuato and Adjacent Mines
- Historic Fortified Town of Campeche, and the nearby Ancient Maya City of Calakmul, Campeche
- Historic Centre of Morelia
- Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara
- Historic Monuments Zone of Querétaro
- Historic Centre of Oaxaca and Archaeological Site of Monte Albán
- Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California
Of course, this list is hardly conclusive. Just about all the places we recommend for real estate are within a few hours’ drive of one or more of the other spectacular places on the list. Mexico has more sites on the list, 26 to be exact, than any other country in the Americas. In coming posts, we’ll be talking about these and others on that list and ways and best times to visit them. They are the sort of places you can learn a lot about on the internet, each is fascinating, complicated and beautiful. But to visit them in person makes each of us feel as though we each have a stake in keeping them.
January 8th, 2007
We’re seeing a real flurry of Real Estate property listings coming into MexLiving.com. In part, we think this is attributable to the changes that are expected in our system after the new year. But don’t worry, these are improvements not restrictions and we’re sure that both buyers and sellers are going to see a lot more properties, and a lot more ease-of-use from the MexLiving.com listings.
In this kind of post, we sometimes like to highlight the absolute bargains that are still available - houses under $150,000 - because we like thinking about them and we’re sure they’re not available anywhere else. The fantastic condos in the picture here run for just about $270,000, but what a fantastic location, and really, what would you pay for such a home in southern California or Florida?
We’re still polishing our Querétaro pages, but the listings are piling up right now in the San Miguel de Allende section. We’ll move them over to the Querétaro section just as soon as it’s ready but we’ll also be adding a whole slew of new properties as this exciting market starts to heat up. The exciting property pictured above is straddling both markets, a short drive from beautiful colonial San Miguel and just a stone’s throw from cosmopolitan Querétaro. US$160,000.
That’s just the beginning too. We’ve been looking at houses and the whole market, and part of what we’re still working on is the fact that there is so much to see in and around Querétaro. The property at right, also just outside Querétaro is again just US$160,000. More photos are available in the listing.
As we wrote above, we’re excited about this new Featured Location and about a bunch of others coming in the New Year. We’ll be adding, Acupulco, Manzanilla and Loreto over the next several weeks. But we’re also making it easier for Home-sellers and Builders to get information on their properties out to you. If you have any questions about these properties or about Moving to Mexico generally, just drop us a line. Of course, we’ll be happy to hear from you.
December 29th, 2006
We’re putting the finishing touches on Querétaro, the next of our Featured Locations of terrific places to Retire in Mexico. And there’s truly lots to be said about Querétaro as a retirement location. Querétaro is one of those unique, relatively big cities that could almost fit somewhere in Arizona or Nevada. For many visitors, at first sight, it is the last thing you’d think a Mexican city might look like. From a distance you might spot a colonial church spire, but more likely your eye will be caught by the shiny, almost brash, modern shopping centers and office buildings that line the near perfect inner-city expressways.
Still this is not Tucson. Your editor was once turned away from the tortilla line at a Querétaro Mega supermarket on Christmas Eve, with hungry family in the car. Just too many people buying tortillas. Right outside though, an independent tortilleria was quickly able to load us up with a good kilo of tortillas, still warm, wrapped in clean paper. At 9:30 PM, Christmas was saved.
Querétaro is relatively new at welcoming foreign retirees, vacationers and second home seekers, but it has been one of Mexico’s largest recipients of internal Mexican migrants. They, like plenty of people, are attracted by the city and state’s rock solid economy, high-tech businesses and the sound management of the city that keeps it clean with good working schools and services. We’ll be writing more about Querétaro as the next few weeks pass and we get ready to start talking about the amazing real estate. You won’t believe some of the houses springing up there.
December 19th, 2006