San Miguel FAQ

Nov 19, 2019:

• Wool and brass masters in SMA,
• Ground cleared to start building the SMA UNAM,
• SMA's first festival of traditional cooks,
• The Mythic Nopal Cactus Is Our New Favorite Edible Green,
• Mexico City's 'Walking Fish',
• Saving the blue parrots of South America.

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Local News Sites
Looking for more news? These are our top local news sites:
San Miguel Times | Atención | Noticias Con Valor (sp) | News San Miguel (sp).
See our Links page for more news sites.
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Wool and brass masters at the SMA Necromancer Cultural Center
Discover the talent of our artisans of #SanMigueldeAllende Attend the XLI National Wool and Brass Fair 2019 at the Ignacio Ramirez Cultural Center “El Nigromante” in #SanMiguelDeLaGente.

From November 18 to 22, the Wool and Brass Fair takes place at the Necromancer Cultural Center. In this edition, more than 80 exhibitors participate, mostly from San Miguel and Guanajuato, who are joined by others from Oaxaca, Michoacán and Guerrero, who exhibit and sell handicrafts on the ground floor of the ...
Wool and brass masters at the SMA Necromancer Cultural Center (sp).

Clean the ground to start building the SMA UNAM
The lands were already clean and ready for the construction of the new Campus of the @UNAM_MX in #SanMigueldeAllende and this is how the groundwork was ...

Since last July, the Directorate of Infrastructure and Public Works set to work in the preparation and cleaning of the land of 4.5 hectares that will house the facilities of the UNAM campus in San Miguel de Allende. Today they are ready to start the construction of the buildings ...
Clean the ground to start building the SMA UNAM (sp).

San Miguel prepares its first festival of traditional cooks
This weekend you can enjoy dishes such as gorditas, mole de güilotas, Tres Marías enchiladas, Tequila chicken, viper broth, as well as ceremonial drinks that will prepare more than 20 traditional cooks. Check the information.

San Miguel de Allende will hold the first Traditional Cooks Festival on November 23, in El Cardo parking lot.

The event is organized by the World Heritage City in coordination with the Secretariat of Tourism of the State of Guanajuato, Ministry of Culture, Municipal DIF and the Tourist Council of San Miguel de Allende.

From 11:00 in the morning to 6:00 in the afternoon, Guanajuato and visitors will enjoy dishes such as gorditas, mole de güilotas, Tres Marías enchiladas, Tequila chicken, snake broth, as well as ceremonial drinks that will prepare more than 20 traditional cooks.
San Miguel prepares its first festival of traditional cooks (sp).

The Mythic Nopal Cactus Is Our New Favorite Edible Green

Though it’s often used in high-end beauty products to combat aging, prickly pear still grows as a weed in much of the Southwest, materializing unexpectedly along roadsides and in front yards. Its spiny pads make it difficult to eradicate and so it is foten left mostly to itself, to grow as and where ever it wishes. Today, Prickly Pear– also known as Nopal– can be found across deserts in the Southwest, Mexico, and South America– and it also grows invasively in Australia, the Indo-Pacific, and East Africa.

The term “prickly pear” is something of a misnomer, as it refers to both the plant itself, and the plant’s fruit. In Spanish, nopal refers to the plant in general, while cladodes identifies the pads of the plant–green, flat, and with thin white spikes. Prickly pear (tuna in Spanish) specifically invokes the rounded fruit, which can be yellow, red, or purple, and bears the same thin white spikes. The term ‘prickly pear’ in English additionally refers to a number of species within the Opuntia genus. In general, when people refer to prickly pear, they are speaking of the plant officially known as Indian fig opuntia.
The Mythic Nopal Cactus Is Our New Favorite Edible Green.

Mexico City's 'Walking Fish'

Frankie was missing half his face. A fungal infection had come over the little axolotl, a native amphibian of the waterways of Mexico City.

But Frankie, along with other axolotls, have a special talent. Veterinarian and axolotl researcher Erika Servín Zamora, who was also Frankie’s caregiver, said she was astounded to see the animal’s remarkable regeneration abilities that she’d read about in her studies. Within two months, Frankie had grown a new, fully functional eye, and life was back to normal in his tank at the city’s Chapultepec Zoo.

Frankie might not have been so lucky in his native habitat, just about 30km south of the zoo. The axolotl, though gaining traction as a symbol of Mexico City, and specifically of the southern borough of Xochimilco, a Unesco World Heritage site, is nearly extinct in the wild due to increases in invasive fish species and water pollution in the city’s troubled canals. Making things worse, Frankie is an albino axolotl, which means he’s light pink with frilly, pink gills coming off his head – he’d be easy prey for Xochimilco’s invasive tilapia in the dark, murky waters.
Mexico City's 'Walking Fish'.

Saving the blue parrots of South America

Mario Cohn-Haft remembers the sinking feeling he had when he realised the parrot he had come to see would probably not appear before him, ever again.

He had taken a bird-watching tour to the area where the very last wild Spix’s macaw, a beautiful blue parrot native to the forests of Brazil, was known to show itself. But that tour was the first he had led that couldn’t spot it.

“I was one of the first people to experience it being extinct in the wild,” says Cohn-Haft, an ornithologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research.

That was 20 years ago. No verified wild specimens have been seen since. The Spix’s macaw was first described in 1638 and is named after the German naturalist, Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix, who collected a specimen in 1819. It’s small for a macaw, but has distinctive blue feathers, often fading to pale grey around the head. South America has many exotically coloured parrots, but the sophisticated blue plumage sets the Spix’s apart from many other species on the continent.
Saving the blue parrots of South America.

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