WEST AND NORTH OF DOWNTOWN

For longer than anyone can remember, the march of Guadalajara’s history has always pointed west. Nuño de Guzmán, Guadalajara’s conquistador, hurried west after pacifying the Valle de Atemajac where the city now spreads. Later, explorers, mission fathers, governors, and the crowd of settlers that followed them did the same. To most Guadalajarans the east represented the old and the settled. The west represented opportunity.  

That’s still true. Guadalajara’s 20th-century history has been largely marked by waves of westward development. A glance at a map of metropolitan Guadalajara reveals successive rings of peripheral thoroughfares—Avenida López Mateos and the northern and southern circunvalación boulevards built during the 1950s, Avenida Patria during the 1970s, and now the periférico that marked the border between city and country at the beginning of the second millennium.

Within those expanding western boundaries, new-style tree-shaded neighborhoods were founded, beginning around 1900, when moneyed merchant and professional families began building stylish, landscaped mansions along broad boulevards beyond the old colonial town’s western edge.

Most of those mansions still line the streets of the earliest western district, known as the colonias antiguas, now part of the Minerva-Chapultepec district that spreads west from old city boundary, marked by Avenida Federalismo. In the Minerva-Chapultepec district, many of those old houses are still occupied by descendants of the first families—some as residences, but many as smart restaurants and shops that decorate the east–west thoroughfares.

Later, during the 1960s and 1970s, a checkerboard of development spread west, south, and north, notably in the southwest-side Plaza del Sol–Chapalita neighborhood. The Plaza del Sol shopping-convention-luxury hotel complex achieved phenomenal success, side by side with the charming tree-shaded Chapalita residential village-within-a-city.

RECTORÍA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE GUADALAJARA: Inside the central hall, the neoclassic rectory houses a pair of grand murals—the contemplative Man and the starkly arresting The People and Their Leaders. (read more)

MUSEO DE LAS ARTES: Enjoy several halls of classic and contemporary graphic arts, painting, and sculpture. (read more)

TEMPLO EXPIATORIO: The neo-Gothic Temple of Atonement has a brilliantly luminous stained-glass interior and a thrice-daily revolving mechanical procession of the Twelve Apostles high on its monumental facade. (read more)

LOS ARCOS: Climb the monument for a panoramic Guadalajara vista and a refreshment at the rooftop café. Take a look at the mural that lines the staircase. (read more)

EXPO GUADALAJARA: Explore inside and most likely you’ll be rewarded by one of the Expo’s many dozens of annual expositions. A multitude of booths display variations on one theme, varying from books and computers to jewelry and shoes. (read more)

EL IZTEPETE ARCHAEOLOGICAL ZONE: A few reconstructed low pyramids and soil permeated by tiny shards of volcanic glass give hints of the uses that ancient Mexicans made of this huge—but largely unexplored—complex of ceremonial platforms, avenues, ball courts, and dwellings. (read more)

BASÍLICA DE NUESTRA SEÑORA DE ZAPOPAN: Visit Guadalajara’s beloved Virgin of Zapopan in her basilica home. Every October 12, hundreds of thousands of Guadalajarans escort her from her temporary resting place at the downtown Guadalajara cathedral back to Zapopan. (read more)

MUSEO HUICHOL WIRRARICA: This excellent museum of indigenous Huichol art, crafts, and customs is worth a visit. Next door, continue to the Museo de la Virgen, fascinating for its exhibit of pilgrim-donated gifts and the exhibits illustrating the Virgin’s miracles. (read more)