Curanderos of Cucuchucho

Well actually beyond the town of Cucuchucho along the lake road to Tzintzuntzan. This is something you'd miss without a tour or had lived in the area for awhile. This project was originally government funded to continue the knowledge and practice of indigenous medicine and medical practice. They are now mostly on their own.

We went with a tour organized through CELEP, my favorite Spanish school in the Patzcuaro area. The site is a combination of garden (herbs) and small hospital with a man and his mother acting as the "curanderos". Her specialty is helping pregnant women with natural birth and he is closest to a chiropractor (spinal alignment) along with herbs and good healthy advice you'd hear anywhere. They have 5-6 beds in the hospital and a large herbal pharmacy. Interesting tour

Curandero in his garden


Class getting herb lessons


Herbs in the garden


Looking down on the hospital from garden

Art and Sol

Art and Sol - a New York Times article

IN A SLEEPY VILLAGE IN MEXICO, THE REAL SURREAL LIVES ON. BY ANTHONY COHAN

Photographs by Trujillo/Paumier

On my second morning in Erongarícuaro, I rose at dawn and slipped out of a converted stable room into the gardens adjoining a vine-trellised stone house built by a Venetian countess who found her way here by horseback in the late 1930s. The air was cool, a pale moon lingered in the sky, and I could glimpse through trees the ‘‘infinitely beautiful lake of Pátzcuaro,’’ as that tireless early-19th-century traveler and genius Alexander von Humboldt described it. Still half asleep, suffused with a residual buzz from mescal sipped on the erstwhile contessa’s veranda the night before, I let myself out through an old wooden gate and took the street called María Luisa Martínez (after a local heroine of the revolt against the Spaniards) to its end, then clambered down a path to the lake.

Link to the complete Art and Sol article