Guadalajara is the Mexican’s Mexico – an archetype of idealized Mexican culture. It is the home town of mariachi music, the romantic ballads performed by large bands of strikingly uniformed musicians playing harps, violins, and soulful trumpets. This is the land of tequila soirees and of plantations of blue agave from which tequila is made.

As Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara embraces mainstream, as well as Mexican, culture, with four 18-hole golf courses and three soccer teams, a zoo, a planetarium, and a large convention centre. Many visitors come to shop. Residents from surrounding haciendas and rural communities buy everything from lizard-skin boots and spurs to plows.

Many of these modern handicrafts are found in the art-driven satellite villages of Tlaquepaque and Tonala, which Guadalajara has swallowed, but not digested. In Guadalajara proper, visitors explore the history centre, a square mile surrounding the cathedral, where historic churches, museums, and shops line pedestrian malls and fountain-filed public squares.