San Bartolo Coyotepec

San Bartolo Coyotepec is a Zapotec town about 11 km south of Oaxaca city on Highway 175, the road to Ocotlán and the coast, and today it sits at the southern edge of the metropolitan area. Its Zapotec name, Tzabeche, is usually read as "place of many tigers" (the wild cats were ocelots), while Coyotepec is Nahuatl for "hill of the coyotes". After the conquest the Spanish called it San Bartolomé, and the parish church facing the main square, painted white with red domes, is still dedicated to Saint Bartholomew.

The town is known across Mexico for barro negro, the black pottery of the Central Valleys. Potters here have worked the local grey clay since the Monte Albán era, some 2,500 years ago, and for most of that time the pieces were matte, sturdy jars for carrying and storing water. In the 1950s Doña Rosa Real Mateo de Nieto (1900–1980) began burnishing her pots with a quartz stone before they were fully dry and firing them a little cooler, which gives the clay its metallic black shine. The shiny pieces are more fragile but became a collectors' favourite, and the whole town followed her lead. Several hundred families still make pottery, firing it in wood-fuelled pit or brick kilns.

Visitors come mainly to watch and buy. Doña Rosa's family still runs her workshop in the family home, demonstrating how a pot is shaped, polished and fired and selling from shelves around the courtyard, and many other family workshops line the streets. A crafts market by the church sells candelabras, vases, animal figures and engraved skulls, which are in high demand before the Day of the Dead. On the south side of the square, the Museo Estatal de Arte Popular de Oaxaca (MEAPO), opened by the state in 2004 and directed by barro negro artist Carlomagno Pedro Martínez, has a hall on the history of the town's pottery plus rooms of folk art from across Oaxaca and temporary shows.