viveros de coyoacán

I got up early this morning and quietly slipped out to head down to Coyoacan, recommended by Sal as one of his favorite neighborhoods. The metro drops you off a good ways off from Coyoacan, on the opposite side of a huge park, the Viveros de Coyoacan. You can’t actually access it from the metro side. You have to walk about a half mile along the perimeter fence to get to one of the three entrances. It was really irritating to me at first having to walk all the way around along a miserable divided thoroughfare, but I understood once I got inside.

A Viveros is a tree nursery as well as a public park. This is where the trees are grown and nurtured for the city’s use in landscaping and parks around the metropolitan region. You want people to respect that and the plants and to preserve it as a destination rather than a access corridor. People have to want to go here. And they do. It was an amazingly beautiful morning, and the park was filled with runners and walkers on the soft paths, and also surprisingly, tons of other activities. There were several clearings filled with groups of martial artists, everything from fully kitted Kendo fighters, to jujistu, to karate lessons. Tons of people in their karate uniforms practicing and fighting and stretching among the trees. There were people doing yoga, calisthenics, even European broadsword.

In the middle of the park is a circular clearing where there were several baseball cap toreadors. They were older gentlemen, casually dressed except practicing the movements of their capes. Another guy wielding a pair of horns, played the part of the bull. They didn’t sadistically stab him with swords, but it was actually pretty fun to watch the “charge” and the swirls of the cape.

Oddly, the squirrels that run around the park are black, or really dark brown.

The park had a wide variety of species and densities and the air smelled wonderful with all the oxygen from the new plants. It’s easily one of my favorite places in Mexico City now.