Mitla

History

Mitla takes its name from Mictlán, the Nahuatl name for the pre-Hispanic city, meaning "land of the dead"; the San Pablo honors Saint Paul. When the Spanish arrived in the 1520s, Mitla was the great religious center of the Oaxaca Valley. Its Zapotec builders decorated their buildings with small flat stones fitted together into geometric fretwork, the feature the site is best known for today.

In 1544 the church of San Pablo was built over part of the old Zapotec religious complex, using the ruins themselves. It stands on a pre-Hispanic platform that now serves as its atrium, and the south atrium wall still shows original Zapotec mosaic work. Inside are many sixteenth-century and colonial statues of saints with well-preserved polychrome. Many houses in the modern town are about 200 years old.

In the twentieth century an old inn called La Sorpresa, run by the Quero family, was bought by the American Edwin Robert Frissell, who founded a museum of Zapotec and Mixtec art there; it closed in 1995. Today Mitla is the commercial and tourist center of its area. Most of the local economy depends on visitors to the ruins, along with handmade textiles, whose designs often come from pre-Hispanic codices, and mezcal, which is handed out free during the patron saint procession each January.