All within easy reach of Guadalajara, three Jalisco towns and cities are hosting important cultural festivals in the next few weeks.

Uruapan, Michoacan — only a four-hour drive from Lake Chapala — has many treasures to enjoy year-round.

If it were not for the excellent travel postings of Matt Gross, the Frugal Traveler of the New York Times, there would be few visitors cobbling their shoes to walk the cobbled streets of Chiapas, the state bordering Guatemala and the famed area of earlier indigenous and human rights movements. The Zapatista cause has faded recently, so the aura exists, but few of the followers.

Vast tracts of land on Mexico’s Pacific coast have been exploited to meet the needs of human occupants. In the process, habitats, species and plant life have been threatened.