The story
As you stroll down the Andador Turístico Macedonio Alcalá, the vibrant pedestrian heart of Oaxaca, the first thing that strikes you isn’t just the warmth of the sun on the green quarry stone buildings, but the explosion of color in the shop windows. You are walking through a living gallery, and among the most mesmerizing sights you’ll encounter are the alebrijes—those surreal, multi-colored carvings that seem to pulse with a life of their own. But these creatures weren’t born from tradition or ancient folklore.
They were born from a nightmare. In 1936, a paper-mâché artist in Mexico City named Pedro Linares fell deathly ill. As he lay in a feverish delirium, he hallucinated a strange, silent forest.
Suddenly, the rocks and trees began to transform. He saw a donkey with butterfly wings, a rooster with bull horns, and a lion with a dog’s head. These chimeric beasts began to chant a single, nonsensical word that echoed through his mind: Alebrijes.
Alebrijes. Alebrijes. When Linares recovered, he began to recreate these monsters in cardboard and paper.
But it was here, in the valley of Oaxaca, that the alebrije found its soul and its skin. If you look closely at the windows of the galleries lining this very street, you’ll see how Oaxacan artisans took Linares’s fever dream and fused it with their own ancestral woodcarving traditions. They began carving the creatures out of the wood of the copal tree, a tree considered sacred since the time of the Zapotecs.
The wood of the copal is soft and easy to shape when fresh, but as you walk past the workshops and boutiques near the Santo Domingo Church just ahead, notice the intricate painting. These aren’t just random dots and lines. The patterns are often deeply symbolic, incorporating Zapotec iconography—motifs representing water, earth, fertility, and the wind.
What started as a chaotic hallucination in a sickbed became a disciplined expression of Oaxacan identity. Today, towns just a short drive from where you are standing, like San Martín Tilcajete and Arrazola, are entirely dedicated to this craft. Every wing, every claw, and every bulging eye you see in the displays along this walkway represents hundreds of hours of painstaking labor.
As you continue your walk down the Andador, let your eyes linger on these fantastic beasts. They are reminders that sometimes, the most beautiful things in our world are the ones we brought back from the edge of the unknown. They are the physical remnants of a dream that refused to be forgotten.