There are seven types: rojo, negro, amarillo, chichilo, verde, coloradito and almendrado. Some restaurants, such as Los Pacos Abasolo , offer a sample of each. Take a cooking class. Check out nearby villages and local markets. For alebrijes , fantasy-inspired wooden figures, visit Arrazola. Take a guided tour of the lovely botanical gardens just behind Santo Domingo Church to learn about the plants and cacti native to the state of Oaxaca.
Take in a Lucha Libre match. Mexicans love wrestling, and Oaxacans are no exception. Matches are held every other Sunday. Videos Beyond Hollywood Hungerlust Pioneers of love. Things to Do. Leon Beckenham. Natural Feature. Copy link. Map View. More info. Open In Google Maps. Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico. Give us feedback. Visit Website. Market, Mexican. My key advice for vegetarians visiting Oaxaca, Mexico is to bring patience and diligence.
Ask specific questions about your food—especially street food—and look out for lard and meat broths in sauces and corn-based dishes. While there are street foods you can eat, use the recommended restaurants and dishes as your starting point. Although known as a mega foodie destination, Oaxaca, Mexico is not a great spot for vegetarians; the food culture here is heavy on the pork.
By the end of my time living in Oaxaca, I ended up cooking at home most days, or dining almost exclusively at the handful of vegan and vegetarian specific spots. Since I usually love eating street food while I travel, this was a change of pace.
Carry your own nuts, fruits, etc for emergencies. Save the vegetarian spots on your Google Maps. Learn how to order your food vegetarian in Spanish. As a vegetarian, there are a lot of caveats to the food scene and it really does help if you speak Spanish before you eat street food. Servers at the restaurants in the city center usually speak English and will often understand a request for vegetarian food. At the nicer restaurants, they will always understand it.
At street stalls, vegetarianism is not understood. They understand the word vegetariano , but every aspect of what that entails is simply not a part of the local culture. This is the largest obstacle to eating vegetarian in Oaxaca; the pork lard is a base for many of the foods most notable in this region.
They use pork lard on the tlayudas and the mamelas. All seven types of mole , the signature sauce, have either lard, chicken stock, or both. Here are a few other considerations when eating specific types of food.
The easiest street food that is almost always safe for vegetarians is the quesadilla with flor de calabaza squash blossom flower.
But to eat even a quesadilla, you need wiggle room in your food standards. Your quesadilla will share a cooking surface, called a comal here, with the meat and lard-filled foods. These surfaces are incredibly hot, so any food on the surface burns off quickly, but they will not take care to avoid contamination.
And although things like the mamelas and tyludas can be made without the lard, which is usually the first layer, the black beans at all street stalls are cross-contaminated with the lard. One street food snack that is always safe is elotes or esquites. One is served on the cob, the other is corn shaved into a cup. All of the carts will serve you either.
Those are the survival tips for eating outside of the vegetarian restaurants. For restaurant foods, there are more options. Most comedores and cantinas , or rather hole-in-the-wall restaurants will fix you an omelet no matter the time of day; these small restaurants can also prepare a cheese quesadilla with the famous Oaxaca string cheese called quesillo.
Beans and rice is a flexitarian dish as there is often pork lard in the beans, and anything but white rice is likely cooked with chicken stock. There is a weekly organic market called Pochote and a woman there sells veg mole, but the protests muddled things up and it was disbanded. Head to Happy Cow Oaxaca for a more extensive list. When ordering your food at smaller non-veg restaurants, always confirm. Be the politely persistent person ensuring your server understands you.
I ordered a croissant drizzled in honey and walnuts at Cafe Nuevo Mundo which has great coffee by the way , and the croissant came out with sliced ham?! To successfully eat vegetarian, you need preparation and patience. I used World Nomads for this trip and since ! I always carry a paper guidebook so that I can easily read the history of each site while I am there. The Lonely Planet guides also have the best transportation sections, which are necessary if you are backpacking the region.
I also have a travel guide to the Yucatan Peninsula and Guatemala for those heading that way. Also, if you want Mexico inspiration once you return home, this Mexico Food Map is a gorgeous way to keep the Mexico memories alive.
Read all my Mexico travel stories and find more regional fiction and nonfiction books and long-reads. Socially responsible travel in Mexico is easier than in some parts of the world. The dark side of animal tourism haunts many travelers in Southeast Asia. But in Mexico, responsible tourism focuses more on people than animals excluding the diving done along the coast! Oaxaca is the heart of indigenous Mexico and Oaxaca State has a large concentration of the indigenous cultures—16 different groups with unique customs and languages date back hundreds of years.
There are general tactics for responsible travel anywhere in the world, and those linked tips allow you to lessen your impact on the places you visit. Oaxaca State is a mountainous region encompassed within the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca. This unique location makes it the ideal place to plan nature hikes and remote homestays within the indigenous communities. In fact, community-based tourism CBT is the number one way to responsibly visit the mountains outside of Oaxaca, as well as the local indigenous cultures.
For formal trekking tours, where you go on a proper adventure with guides, Expediciones Sierra Norte is the best company. Not only are their tours great, but they have sound responsible tourism practices. They have offices in Oaxaca Centro if you want a face-to-face before booking something. Oaxaca Mio offers the best information on each site, what they offer, and contact information. Oaxaca Mio provides information on programs in all the tiny towns, like San Miguel del Valle , which is an uber traditional town where I spent many of my volunteers hours.
You can also find information on the nearby Pueblos Magicos , which are cultural heritage towns singled out by the government as special. The green area on the map, Pueblos Mancomunados , is particularly popular with birders and nature lovers. Oaxaca has a range of opportunities for travelers keen to volunteer in the region.
Most of the volunteer opportunities require at least a few weeks commitment from volunteers to ensure greatest impact. That said, there are opportunities for short-term projects if you have specialized skills such as any sort of medical or healthcare background, or a background in construction and building-type work. The indigenous communities outside of Oaxaca often lack access to strong healthcare.
For that reason, doctors in any field medical, dental, ophthalmology, physical therapy, etc are particularly useful, even in short clinics. There are many large NGOs offering paid programs, but you can easily find indie opportunities that only require you to cover your own room and board for this type of travel.
Consider this list of vetted independent volunteer opportunities in Mexico —there are extensive options in Oaxaca State. Consider using and visiting these Mexican social enterprises on your trip. Supporting social enterprises is one of the easiest ways to create a trip with positive impact.
This means picking businesses that are using funds to support local communities and to offer training, support, or to protect natural resources. You can do everything from shop for souvenirs to learning how to make pure chocolate to picking a trekking guide to finding a homestay—all with companies committed to social impact and respect.
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