Los Angeles Bay
Lower California it is that Mexico that grew up forgotten by Mexico and influenced, for better and for worse, by the US. a border world that we travel by car after its coasts and deserts, its dishes and wines, and to the rhythm of the corridos sung by the northerners.
Ezekiel Benitez Don Ezequiel has coppery skin, hard calloused hands, silver hair, and an exuberant smile of pride. Don Ezequiel started collecting old knickknacks almost 50 years ago. First a mower like the ones used in the mexicali valley at the beginning of the 20th century. Then another. Then rudimentary washing machines, bottles, knives, armchairs... Literally, everything. I had so many objects that one day I decided or mount a small exhibition in a shack . But he immediately outgrew him.
And so, as he counts satisfied, he and two buddies, as they could, looking at photos on the internet, "without wool or anything, with a good eye, nailing here and there", They've built a whole Wild West town . One like those of the gringo cowboy movies that you don't even like.
Aerial view of San Felipe
One with 16 stores already, with its salon, with its barbershop, with its bank, which is filled on weekends with visitors who come to see its gadgets and eat the often , this red broth soup with guajillo chili, beef and corn that awakens the dead, that is served in their canteens.
Towns like this were never like this in the state of Baja California, in Mexico , nor across the border in California . Even so, Don Ezequiel, who remembered visiting as a child Tombstone, Arizona , one of the most famous villages of that Legendary Far West Of Cinema, where sheriff Wyatt Earp lived and died in his eighties, he decided that this, that he was inventing something that didn't exist, was a small detail that didn't matter.
Today your Valley Museum , as it is officially called, is one of the attractions of a city, Mexicali, which has nothing apart from the traditional local sport of watching how thermometers rise until they touch the air conditioning of hell . And nothing is, also literally, nothing.
Dance at the Valle de Mexicali Museum
Although what it does have is the border, the fence that Trump wants to turn into a even taller and thicker concrete wall and that here it suddenly appears two blocks from the center cutting the city suddenly, as if it were the movie the truman show or those ancient maps where the sea ended and the dragons began; and the Chinese Food , historical heritage from the beginning of the last century of the Chinese who were expelled from the United States and who came down to the south to work cotton.
And yet, both Mexicali and the cowboy village of Don Ezequiel they are a perfect metaphor for northern Baja California . From a state that has been inventing itself as best it could and they have left it and as it has pleased.
These lands were neither Mexico nor the United States . They were almost no man's land. Until a few decades ago, the Mexican peso hardly circulated, because only the dollar was known. As only the television signal circulated and the music that came from the other side, from ** San Diego **. Until the North American industry began to arrive and establish its assembly plants, its maquiladoras, and the border became a big business and then Baja California began to interest Mexico City.
Saint Quentin
This is a new old Mexico. One with air Robert Rodriguez film in its border cities, in that Tijuana which was founded and prospered on liquid foundations of alcohol during the time of the Dry Law in the north and that even today is a destination partying, canteens and finding the forbidden for the neighbors upstairs, or in that Mexicali, the state capital, on the way.
One cannot come to this Mexico to seek the beauty and culture of other Mexicos. The colonizers did not stay here, only the Jesuits and Franciscans who founded some missions whose skeletons are still standing, who brought the technique to make the wine they needed for the masses – that some other drink would pour... – and planted the first vineyards.
That is why its cities, with hardly any history, are so strange, as if everything were suburban neighborhoods or industrial estates. And the same thing happens with the traditions . They are celebrated, yes, the same as in the rest of the country, but with less colorful, less intensity and less folklore . Because all that came much later and because from above the yankee presence seeped and seeped , whose cultural influence is greater than that of the country itself.
Here, in fact, in Baja California, they speak spanglich, as they define it, thus, ending in "ch" . And they say things like "take a blast" when they are going to call someone or “have some drinks” when they want to have a drink.
Vineyards in Mount Xanic
But all that is what makes this state special. Although one takes time to realize it. The first reaction upon arrival is to yearn for that old Mexico in which there is so much of everything . Then, as if we were taking the red pill of Matrix , you finally begin to see its reality. Because it is precisely all that, that absence of the past, that fence that, like a terrible seam, separates the trite American dream from reality -you already know the famous “poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States” attributed to Porfirio Díaz –, that destination until recently only visited by gringos or gabachos, as retired Americans are called, that inventing and reinventing oneself, which makes Baja California so fascinating and fun.
That road trip, because that's it, that's what traveling here consists of, getting in the car and going through it, so unpublished, so unexpected, so – hallelujah – little exploited.
And one of the moments where all this is perceived very well, where that world is decoded, it is at the table, when one sits down to eat . The chef Miguel Angel Guerrero he had grandparents from Santander, Granada and Teruel.
His father taught him how to hunt and today he hunts and fishes and cooks and serves what he catches. A decade ago he came up with a concept: Baja-Med kitchen . “I couldn't talk about Baja California cuisine because it didn't really exist. And then I thought that. The fact that there is no culinary tradition of centuries it allows us to be more daring”, he explains in The Querence , his Tijuana restaurant, clutching a glass of wine. Guerrero defined like this, or invented like this, the cooking that takes place here.
Colonial church bell tower in Tijuana
Because of the weather, Baja California is reminiscent of the Mediterranean. It creates olive trees and other products that are not used in the rest of the country. It is also a peninsula, bathed to the East by the sea of cortez and to the west by Pacific Ocean , and that fills the kitchens with seafood and fish . Thus was born a culinary movement that is gradually turning this state into a benchmark for national gastronomy.
In Baja California they also have an added jewel, also very Mediterranean: the valley of guadeloupe where it is produced today most of the country's wine . An area to visit from winery to winery and enjoy.
This is not the Napa on the other side of the fence, where you come with your credit card to buy the most expensive wine. These are groups or couples who go there to have a good time. Pretty women in flowing dresses and hats and smiling men with flushed cheeks who, instead of walking around stirring and smelling the wine from their glasses, dedicate themselves, above all, to drinking it.
“We are not competing against the United States. There is a synthetic experience. Like a McDonald's, where everything is already organized and whatever you choose, it was already fixed previously. Here is more freedom ", Explain Alex Ford, sommelier at the Decantos winery .
Encuentro Guadalupe Hotel and Winery
Proposals such as these wineries and restaurants such as La Querencia or Bruma and Encuentro Guadalupe, both in the valley, are the more chic, more exquisite, more strawberry too , as they say in Mexico to the posh, of destiny.
But the good thing is that afterwards there are also other sides, other faces for a polyhedral destiny. Like that border mexico that is familiar, even from hearing about it, as is the case with Tijuana. Or like the trip itself, the third one. That drive down south down the west coast looking for the beaches and seafood of San Felipe or the waters of Sea of Cortez from San Luis Gonzaga Or the bay of los angeles , in which the whale shark swims.
Crossing granite gorges and deserts of saguaro cacti –the round ones with arms, the ones from the movies–, candles, which look like mouse tails stuck in the ground, and ocotillos, whose branches sprout palm leaves. Burn roads where there is not even a telephone signal and where suddenly a small restaurant appears that advertises seafood on the poster and served by three countrymen who are dedicated to killing time and don't even know if they have cold beer in the fridge.
La Lobera beach, in San Quintin
Arturo, one of them, who takes advantage of the visit to take a break from doing nothing, tells me that "thousands of people" pass by and I look at him and smile and nod because I am not the one to contradict him. And then there is still the east coast, and climb it on the way to the valley and its wines, towns like San Quintin , ugly, very ugly, built around the Transpeninsular Highway, but that in exchange offers in its outskirts blue and green cliff landscapes and one wolf in a cave that looks like a lunar crater with a hundred seals that is to spend hours watching the animals yawn or crawl into the water as if they had come out the night before.
EITHER Cove , where the Mrs. Sabine has one of the best positions planet Street Food, La Guerrerense, in which she cooks some ceviche toast –Because she says that “if God only gives you lemons, make ceviche” – that later they will make you look at her as she looks at a mother.
lonely road
Ensenada is also ground zero for surfing in the state . Especially the San Miguel beach , where surfers say that this sport began in the country. And it is also the most beautiful town, where you least miss that other Mexico with history and architecture, if it is that when you arrive here one still longs for that other Mexico.
In Ensenada one also sees on the street, as in Tijuana or Tecate, to those bands of norteños with their cowboy hats, their boots and their instruments that offer songs for pesos.
They sing that: "Mexicali was my cradle, Tecate my adoration, from my coquettish Tijuana I bring a love lit and my heart stayed there in Ensenada". They are the same musicians as in bars like Hussong's they clear corridos against the background noise, stepping on the carpet of peanut shells and making room for themselves among a clientele in which the usual parishioners and the gringos mix, the best and the worst of each house, of each world, as in the state, and where the chelas run because it's happy hour and we've arranged to have some drinks and just a little, in short, matter right now.
Surfing in Ensenada
_*This report was published in **number 121 of Condé Nast Traveler Magazine (September)**. Subscribe to the printed edition (11 printed issues and a digital version for €24.75, by calling 902 53 55 57 or from our website). The September issue of Condé Nast Traveler is available in its digital version to enjoy on your preferred device. _
Dos Panes Restaurant in Mexicali