Callejón de los Sapos

The Callejón de los Sapos is a short stretch of Calle 6 Sur a few blocks southeast of the Zócalo, together with the little square beside it, the Plazuela de los Sapos, and it gives its name to the whole surrounding barrio. The toads were real. The neighbourhood grew up on the city's early eastern edge, near the San Francisco river, in ground that flooded easily, and an open irrigation ditch crossed it. That old channel is why the plazuela cuts diagonally across Puebla's otherwise perfect grid, as plans of 1698 and around 1750 show. The standing water bred toads, and the name Calle de los Sapos turns up in city records from 1731. For a time the alley was also called Calle de Romero, after the man who owned the houses on its east side in the late 17th century.

In colonial times this was a working district of tanneries and tocinerías, the pork-fat workshops that supplied Puebla's soap trade, which needed running water to carry waste down to the river. Trees were planted in the plazuela around 1785, and from 1816 a weekly market was allowed there. In the 20th century came a market of stalls in 1935 and space for the city's mariachis in 1959, and the stone benches set out a year later are still there. Antique dealers began settling in from the 1960s, and the barrio became known for rustic furniture. In the late 1990s bars took over and the area got a rough name, until a recovery plan started in 2013 closed many of the nightspots.

Today it is one of the most photographed corners of the centro, with houses painted yellow, blue, green and red, and its shops sell antiques, old Talavera, religious art, toys, radios and frames all week. On Saturdays and especially Sundays the bazaar spreads into the street and plazuela with stalls of old jewellery, sepia photographs and collectible soda bottles, and the cantinas fill up, among them La Pasita, famous for its sweet raisin liqueur. A few blocks north, near El Parián, the Barrio del Artista has its own lively scene: a row of working studios on 8 Norte founded by Puebla painters in the early 1940s.