Tenancingo

Tenancingo de Degollado, a busy market town in the valley west of Malinalco, is best known for its rebozos, the long woven shawls worn across Mexico. Families here have woven them for generations, and the town remains one of the country's main producers. Many are made with the ikat technique, where the threads are tied and dyed before weaving, and the knotted fringes are a craft of their own. Patterns have local names, like the blue-and-white palomo or the speckled granizado.

The town is also a flower center, ringed by the greenhouses it shares with neighboring Villa Guerrero, and it has a market dedicated to cut flowers. On Thursdays and Sundays a large tianguis fills the center with rebozos, pottery, fruit and food. Local specialties include obispo, a spiced sausage the town celebrates with its own fair, and the bread of nearby San Miguel Tecomatlán.

Above town, on the Cerro de las Tres Marías, stands a 30-meter statue of Cristo Rey inaugurated in 1985. You can reach it by road or climb more than a thousand steps from the Calvario church, and the reward is a wide view of the valley and its greenhouses. Tenancingo is also the gateway to the Desierto del Carmen national park, just southeast of town.