Malinalco, Mexico.
Photographer: Felipe LunaTravel Guide
The Weekend Destination That Mexico City’s Creative Class Prefers
Malinalco, about two hours’ drive southwest from the capital, has been an under-the-radar escape for locals. A new mezcal designation is raising its profile.
If you stand in the middle of Malinalco’s central plaza—a pastoral square surrounded by sheer volcanic rock faces cloaked in flowering subtropical forest—it’s hard to imagine that Mexico City, the hemisphere’s largest metropolis with some 20 million people, lies just two hours away by road.
But though Malinalco is a popular weekend getaway among artists and musicians from the capital, its superlative waterfalls and colonial chapels and a magnificent Aztec ruin are little-known to most foreign visitors.