Veracruz is a city with a Caribbean soul, soaked up with feisty rhythms, feisty people, fierce sunshine, salsa and beautiful spirited madness. Veracruz is hot with music – sensuous and sensual – a city for dancers, drinkers and drunks.
Part grotty industrial port, part elegant colonial jewel, Veracruz derives its endless energy from the melodies spilling through its streets. Guitars intoxicate the terraces, marimbas swallow the plazas in one gulp, and Cuban-style bands play out their passions in bars and dimly-lit cafeterias across the city.
This is the oldest port in Mexico, where Cortez first colonised the American mainland. And like all good port towns, it possesses style and depravity in equal abundance.
Between the regal arches and expansive plazas, the unrelenting humidity invites continual decay: black sooty mould upon crumbling edifices, the ripe aroma of slowly rotting humanity, heat like damp hot hands upon your flesh, sweat and sex and death everywhere.
The streets are awash with hawkers and peddlers – itinerant musicians seeking a commission, cigar salesmen with dubious Cuban puros, gypsy palm readers with sinister blessings, whores, drunks, beggars and thieves. Everyone’s out to party.
This is the Veracruz of old. The Veracruz of cut-throats and buccaneers and wildly inebriated sailors. This is the Veracruz of pleasure and vice, horror, clap, blood, rum and brawling, bawling tragedy. This is the Veracruz of night.
But at dawn, the creatures retreat and the endless thumping of drums and headboards relents. The city takes breakfast in great dining halls with lofty, lazy ceiling fans, impeccable 1950s decor and armies of white-shirted waiters armed with kettles of hot black coffee and hot white milk. Between the bouts of savage hedonism, Veracruz is a place of impeccable character.
