6 within 3½ hours · 3 under 2 hours
Oaxaca city has three Pueblos Mágicos within an easy day. Mitla, forty minutes east past the Tule tree, has Zapotec palaces covered in stone mosaics and a mezcal trail around it. Capulálpam de Méndez, an hour and a quarter up into the Sierra Norte, is a pine-forest village with traditional medicine and community-run ecotourism. Teposcolula, an hour and a half northwest in the Mixteca, has one of the great open chapels of New Spain. For a weekend, the pilgrimage town of Juquila and the turtle beach of Mazunte are over the southern sierra.
Best months for the area: Jan, Feb, Mar, Dec (when most of these towns are dry with comfortable afternoons)
Day trips (under 2 hours) 3
Close enough to drive there and back from Oaxaca in a day. Closest first.
1 h 16 min · 73 km
Best: Jan, Feb, Mar, Dec
Fiestas: Mar, Apr, Sep, Nov, Dec
Weekend escapes (2 to 3½ hours) 3
Worth a night or two. Closest first.
On the map
Getting there
Oaxaca has its own airport, Oaxaca (OAX), so you can fly in and rent a car there.
A car is the easiest way to reach most of these towns; the bigger ones also have direct buses from Oaxaca. Each pueblo's page has its own getting-there notes.
Drive times are from OpenStreetMap routing without traffic. Times marked ~ are estimated from the distance and may run longer on mountain roads.