You follow a chef through a neighborhood market, tasting blue corn tlacoyos off the comal, fresh-cut fruit with chile and lime, and tacos al pastor shaved straight from the trompo. By noon you'll have opinions about salsa that you'll carry home for years.

Walk through the cobalt-blue house where Frida Kahlo was born, painted, and died, with her easel, her garden, and her collection of folk art just as she kept them. Then wander Coyoacán's leafy plazas for churros and hot chocolate.

Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez the world's aquarium, and you'll see why at the sea lion colony off Isla Espíritu Santo. The pups spin circles around your mask and tug at your fins while pelicans dive overhead.

Masked luchadores fly off the ropes while the crowd roars, vendors pass cold beers down the rows, and families cheer for their favorite heroes and villains. It's theater, sport, and one of the most joyful nights out in the city.

You lift off in the cool dawn as the light spreads across the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. From above, the scale of the ancient city finally comes into focus, and the whole valley glows gold.

Outside Puerto Escondido, you paddle into a mangrove lagoon on a dark night, and every stroke sets the water glowing blue. Trail your fingers over the side and sparks scatter around your hand like a second sky.

Off the coast of Riviera Nayarit, you swim through a rock tunnel into a crater open to the sky, with a crescent of sand tucked inside. Blue-footed boobies nest on the islands above while you float in the clear water below.

You walk the rows with a farmer whose family has worked the same hillside for generations, pick ripe red cherries by hand, and follow the beans all the way to the cup in your hands.

On the Zócalo, Rivera's murals sweep across the stairwells of the Palacio Nacional, telling Mexico's whole history in color. Steps away, the excavated Templo Mayor reveals the heart of the Aztec capital right beneath the modern city.

Arrive at opening, when the ruins are yours and the sea below is still glassy. The Maya built this walled city on a cliff above the water, and the view from El Castillo over white sand and turquoise surf is one you'll keep.

In this UNESCO biosphere reserve south of Tulum, you slip into a canal the Maya carved through the mangroves centuries ago and let the gentle current carry you along. Orchids and bromeliads hang overhead, and the water is so clear you can watch fish beneath your feet.

Oaxaca is known as the land of seven moles, and every family guards its own version. You toast chiles, grind cacao on a stone metate, and stir a pot with more than twenty ingredients and generations of opinion behind it.

The freshwater lagoon of Bacalar shifts from pale turquoise to deep indigo as the light moves across it. You sail its calm water, swim beside ancient stromatolites, and end the day with a golden hour toast on the dock.

In this village outside Oaxaca City, families carve whimsical creatures from copal wood and cover them in dazzling patterns, one tiny brushstroke at a time. You'll sit at the workshop table with a master artisan and paint your own alebrije to carry home.

On Baja's East Cape, a small fishing community chose to protect its reef decades ago, and today it is one of the great conservation comebacks in the ocean. You snorkel among schools of jacks so thick they swirl around you like a silver storm.