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DAY TRIPS from Oaxaca City

If you’re planning a trip around Oaxaca, or you’re coming in for a wedding and want to make the most of your time here, this page is for you.

Oaxaca City is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes, but the state around it holds some of the best day trips in Mexico: petrified waterfalls, a 2,500-year-old mountaintop city, and a valley where mezcal is still made the way it was a century ago. Below are the three trips I send couples and their guests on most often, with what to expect from each one.

A note on how this works: I’m a photographer, not a tour operator. What I can do is connect you with the guides I’ve used myself or sent clients to for years — people who know the sites, drive safely, and speak enough English to keep things easy. Reach out through the contact page, by WhatsApp at 52-951-594-3025, or on Instagram and I’ll point you the right way.

Hierve el Agua & Mitla

This is the trip most people mean when they ask me “what should we do while we’re here.” Hierve el Agua is a set of mineral springs that have calcified over thousands of years into rock formations that look exactly like waterfalls frozen mid-fall. You swim in the pools at the top, and the whole Tlacolula Valley opens up in front of you. It photographs like nowhere else I’ve worked, which is part of why I keep bringing couples back here for portraits.

Most tours pair it with Mitla, a Zapotec and later Mixtec site with stonework you won’t see anywhere else in Mexico — geometric mosaic friezes cut and fitted without mortar, panel by panel. It’s a smaller, quieter stop than the ruins most people picture, and worth the twenty minutes it takes to walk through. Some guides will also stop at a family-run mezcal palenque on the way back, which is a nice preview if the Mezcal Route below doesn’t make it onto your schedule.

Plan on a full day. I’ve written up the road-by-road logistics — bus versus colectivo versus hiring a driver, entry fees, restrooms, and the best time of day to beat both the heat and the tour buses — in a separate guide to Hierve el Agua. Read that one before you go.

Monte Albán

Monte Albán sits on a mountain the Zapotecs leveled by hand around 500 BCE, and it stayed the seat of power in these valleys for close to fifteen hundred years. You can see why they picked the spot the moment you’re standing in the Great Plaza — the three arms of the valley all meet below you, which meant whoever held this hill could see anyone coming from any direction.

It’s a shorter trip than Hierve el Agua, thirty to forty minutes each way, so a lot of guides build it into a half-day with a stop or two in the artisan villages on the way back into the city — San Bartolo Coyotepec for the black clay pottery (barro negro), or Arrazola for the painted wood alebrijes, if wood-carved animal spirits sound like your kind of souvenir. Go early. The site has almost no shade, and by midday the light goes flat for photos and the heat gets serious.

If any of your wedding guests only have one free morning in Oaxaca, this is usually the one I point them to — it’s the most efficient way to see something genuinely ancient without giving up a whole day of the trip.

The Mezcal Route

Agave fields near Yagul, in the heart of mezcal country.

This one’s less about a single site and more about a stretch of the Tlacolula Valley — around Santiago Matatlán, San Baltazar Guelavila, and the smaller villages nearby — where mezcal is still made by hand, family by family. A good palenque visit walks you through the whole process: agave hearts roasted in an earthen pit for days until they’re smoky and sweet, crushed under a stone wheel pulled by a horse or a mule, fermented in wood with wild airborne yeast, then run through a clay or copper still. Nothing about it has changed much in a hundred years.

Tastings usually move from espadín, the workhorse cultivated agave most mezcal is made from, up through the wild varieties — tobalá, tepextate, arroqueño — that take anywhere from ten to thirty-five years to mature and taste like it. Expect a wedge of orange and a pinch of sal de gusano (worm salt) alongside each pour, which cuts the alcohol and brings out the smoke.

A couple of honest notes: this is a tasting tour, so go with a driver, not behind the wheel yourself, and pace yourself early in the day if you’ve got a wedding or a shoot later that week. It’s also easy to combine with a stop at the Sunday market in Tlacolula de Matamoros if your dates line up — one of the oldest and largest tianguis markets in the state.

Planning around your wedding

If you’re building this into a wedding trip, the order I usually recommend is Monte Albán or the Mezcal Route early in the week, while everyone’s still fresh, and Hierve el Agua a day or two before or after the wedding itself — it’s the one most people want to photograph in, so you don’t want to be sunburned or hungover for it. Happy to help you map the whole week out once you’ve got a date on the books.

I hope you found this useful. Get in touch if you have questions, or if you’re looking to book a photography session at any of these locations — Hierve el Agua especially. You can reach me at the contact page, by WhatsApp at 52-951-594-3025, or on Instagram.

Keep Planning

• Preparing Your Trip to Hierve el Agua — hours, entry fees, and the best time of day to go
• How to Plan a Destination Wedding in Oaxaca — a month-by-month checklist
• Portraits — including a Hierve el Agua maternity session
• Real Oaxaca Weddings