Less than a fifteen-minute cab ride from the heart of the city’s historical center, settled into the mountainside that overlooks the city, is Villa Montaña: one of Michoacán’s finest hotels.  The property was conceived and is run by a French Count and his wife, who together pooled considerable talents in architecture, décor, art, and gourmet gastronomy to create a very special space for guests to arrive, relax and be at ease.

The hotel’s accommodation comprises thirty-six villa-style rooms; each one featuring its own unique interior design and character. Standard rooms feature a garden view and real-wood fireplaces (useful between November and March each year, when the climate at this city’s altitude can become chilly or cold after sundown), bathroom with a shower-tub, internet access, safety-deposit box and direct-dial telephone.  Suites also offer living rooms with more space, garden or panoramic views over the city, and larger bathrooms.  Master suites offer a separate living and sleeping spaces and generous bathrooms; and the Presidential Suite, ideal for special occasions, offers utmost luxury and a private terrace with panoramic city views.

The on-site restaurant is one of the finest dining experiences you’ll find in the state of Michoacán.  Enjoy breakfast, lunch or dinner while a gourmet chef prepares meals from a menu featuring regional and international flavors.  The terrace bar offers a perfect space to unwind and relax after a day’s exploration or, if you’re here on business, after a day’s work.  The property enjoys panoramic views of the city, and guests often muster on the bar’s terrace during the late evening to watch night fall and the lights illuminate Morelia’s historic buildings, including the city’s impressive cathedral.

The hotel offers a business center as well as meeting rooms for banquets, conferences and special events.  The hotel is well equipped and provides the perfect backdrop for business meetings, team-building events, and wedding receptions. Private meeting rooms for ten people are available and up to 150 people may be accommodated in the function rooms for larger events and banquets.

The on-site Spa, that offers an ample range of treatments including massage, facials, and body treatments, has been created with the same painstaking attention to detail and quality as the hotel proper.

Villa Montaña offers its guests first-class service in the most alluring surroundings.  Morelia is an exceptional colonial city and Villa Montaña is an exceptional hotel. The two compliment each other magnificently and discerning travelers arriving here will enjoy one of the finest accommodation experiences available in colonial Mexico.

We’re very pleased to be recommending Villa Montaña to our readers and members as part of our Mexico Hotels Collection.  You can read more about this hotel’s services, view a photo gallery, and make secure reservations online or by telephone with Mexperience.

Hotel Details: Villa Montaña, Morelia, Mexico

Depending on whose figures are to be believed, we could determine that global flight passenger numbers are down between fifteen and twenty per cent; hotel bookings are down at least fourteen per cent, and so we may deduce that the support industries which surround these two ‘anchor’ services such as catering, local transport, tours and activity operators have felt a similar-sized hit to their businesses.

Mexico earns about US$16 billion a year from tourism: about half of this amount from foreign visitors. Although Mexico’s domestic travel and tourism market is valuable in its own right, the country is always seeking to nurture and grow the foreign currency it earns from international visitors.

As one of the world’s top tourism destinations, Mexico is shouldering its fair-share of the recessionary pain that all tourism markets are experiencing now.  Although it’s also fair to observe that the current scale of the downturn is often compared to three ‘golden’ years between 2004 and 2007 – years which delivered unprecedented and record-breaking rises in tourism revenues accompanied with a growth story that could never be sustained in the long term.

While industry players gather in London this week for the World Travel Market, there is cautious optimism about the prospect of an improvement to the industry’s fortunes during 2010.  The macro-economic indicators would suggest that the optimism is not wholly misplaced.

However, prosperity from the upswing, when it comes, is likely to be drawn differently to the manner in which fortunes were made during the boom-period.  Not again in our lifetime are we likely to witness the hyper-growth in tourism experienced during the 2004-2007 period; and as the middle classes readjust their lifestyle expectations sporting tighter belts, they will surely make far more discerning choices about how they spend their hard-earned disposable income.

The markets which emerge from this downturn are likely to be characterized by more demanding buyers.  People are likely to travel less, but spend more money when they do travel.  The emphasis will shift from volume to quality; insipid travel packages will give way to carefully considered travel experiences.

Although the hyper-growth story has come to an end, Mexico remains one of the world’s most attractive destinations for foreign visitors.  This has come to pass by means of a different story: the airports, roads, world-class hotels, fine restaurants, championship golf courses, and organizations which enable visitors take part in a broad choice of activities have come about through four decades of planning, continuous hard work and investment.

Notwithstanding one of the toughest trading environments in living memory, all of those assets are still here, and Mexico remains very well-prepared indeed; and quite capable of delivering the higher standards that visitors will likely seek as travel and leisure becomes a more precious and measured purchase.

However last week Mexico’s lawmakers passed another Bill, creating a second public holiday for Dia de la Revolucion meaning that the date would have been observed twice this year: on Friday, November 20th (the date proper) and on Monday, November 16th, the date the celebration was scheduled to be observed on, under the legislation currently in force.

In July of this year, two lawmakers representing the PRI political party in Mexico, sponsored a Bill that if passed would have caused ‘Bank Holiday Mondays’ to be removed from Mexico’s official public holidays altogether; citing that the holidays did not create the additional tourism revenues expected as a result of creating long weekends.

The passage of this latest Bill, voted through by the Lower House last week, took many by surprise. Industrial and commercial interests were none-too-fond of the idea, especially as they had programmed their production and employee-leave schedules to fit-in with the current legislative protocol.

Last night, Mexico’s Senate – whose approval was required for the Bill to pass into law – voted down the act and in doing so left Monday, November 16th as the only public holiday observing Dia de la Revolucion this year.

It remains uncertain as to whether the official holiday in 2010, which marks the bi-centenary of the start of Mexico’s revolution, will be held as scheduled by the current legislation on Monday, November 15th 2010, on the date proper, or both.

Twitter is a social and business networking facility that enables people to broadcast short messages. Anyone ‘following’ those messages receives an instant notification when they are published and may link to further information when that message contains a web link.  The technology is also known as ‘micro blogging’, so we’ve added the service to our Blogs section on Mexperience.

Messages on Twitter are called ‘Tweets’ and they have a maximum length of 140 characters.  The messages are posted on the author’s Twitter page and these are instantaneously delivered to all people who subscribe to that page; subscribers are termed as ‘followers’.  Subscribing to and posting messages on Twitter is free of charge to users, although if the service is accessed via a mobile device, SMS charges may apply.

We are using Twitter as a means to keep readers and members updated about Mexperience and Mexico.

By following Mexperience on Twitter, you can:

• Get updates when new blog stories are published
• Be among the first to know when new guides are published
• Find out when existing guides on Mexperience are updated or enhanced
• Stay updated with important local news and events in Mexico
• Quickly share information you find useful on Mexperience with others using Twitter

If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can sign-up free at Twitter.com.

To follow Mexperience on Twitter, simply login to you account, visit Twitter.com/Mexperience, and click the “Follow” button situated underneath the ‘M’ Logo on our Twitter Page.

Mexperience does not store any of your personal information when you subscribe to our page on Twitter, and you can un-subscribe (termed by Twitter as ‘un-follow’) from the Mexperience Twitter page at any time.

Connect to the new Twitter Page on Mexperience for details.

The upgrade retains all of the key elements which have made Mexperience one of the web’s most visited sites, and adds many fresh and innovative features to make the enormous resource of content and information we publish more easily accessible.

We have restructured the website into eight closely-interwoven sections which enable you to browse and find the topics that interest you quickly, and connect to information, local knowledge and services which will help you to make informed decisions, and realize your plans and experiences in Mexico.

This upgrade also sets in place a foundation upon which we will deliver even more content and value for Mexperience readers.  New guides, features and services will be introduced in the weeks ahead as part of our growth plan and commitment to bringing you a world-class Mexico information resource.  We will announce the new services as they come online via Mexico Insight and Vista, our monthly Mexico Newsletter.

We hope you enjoy this latest release of Mexperience.com, and look forward to serving you.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any comments or questions.

The domain authority was keen to promote the advent of its new country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), and position it as the premier extension for Mexico-related website addresses.  A multi-million dollar advertising campaign ensued, broadcasting messages using radio, television, billboards and, of course, on the internet.  The ads proclaimed “.MX is the new way to say Mexico”.

In addition to wooing the millions of Mexican businesses who would be lining up to secure names under the new ccTLD, the authority also advertised to the US business community, persuading potential registrants that ‘.MX is the way to talk to the Hispanic market in the USA’.

The launch of new TLDs always gives rise to some controversy, principally because domain names are most often registered to owners on a ‘first-come, first-serve’ basis, a system that can play into the hands of “Domainers”, people who register names in an attempt to sell them on at prices much higher than their initial registration value.

Although there does exist a buoyant “secondary” domain name market for good generic names and phrases, some people who have tried to extort money from large companies (or smaller companies with an established trading record) by offering to sell names directly related to the company have come unstuck when courts of law ruled that registered trademarks and company names registered before the domain name have legal rights which supersede a Domainer’s ‘first-served’ registration advantage.

In an attempt to circumvent some of the issues which have dogged the release of other TLDs, NIC Mexico undertook a study of ‘TLD launches’ in other countries and regions and devised a registration policy based on that research.   The Mexicans decided that they would introduce a “sunrise” period for the launch of the Dot-MX domain, starting on May 1.  During this period, the authority offered all existing holders of Mexican domain names a three-month window in which to pre-register the exact same name(s) as those held under Dot-COM.MX.  This was fair and sensible: fair because those people and companies holding existing Dot-COM.MX domains would not have to concern themselves about others registering names they had already secured in Mexico; and sensible because had this not been offered, the integrity of the new Dot-MX ccTLD may have become commercially untenable.

On August 1st, the sunrise period ended, giving way to a so-called ‘quiet period’; a month in which the sunrise pre-registrations were confirmed and any disputes settled.

On September 1st, a two-month ‘Land Rush’ period began.  From this date, anyone was allowed to go online and apply for registration of a Dot-MX domain that was not already pre-registered under the sunrise rules, or that was not otherwise restricted (for example, Mexican state names were reserved for exclusive use by Mexican state governments).

However, the regular US$35 registration fee policy was abandoned during the Land Rush period, in favor of a staggered price system.  Under this scheme, names registered nearer to September 1st were much higher in price than those registered nearer to October 31st.   Prices started at around US$700 at the beginning of September and steadily decreased to US$50; the new ccTLDs ‘standard’ registration and annual renewal price.

The Land Rush period ended on October 31st so, as of now, anyone can continue to apply for registration of Dot-MX domains at the standard price, although some domain registrars are offering discounts on this.

As .MX is much simpler than its predecessor .COM.MX, we can expect to see and hear ‘Dot-MX’ a lot more in the coming months and years.  Its predecessor will continue to be current and active and most would-be registrants coming to the market for a Mexico-related domain in future will likely seek to register both extensions to secure their name, product or brand online.

Mexperience.com, which is accessible at Mexperience.com.mx, can now also be accessed at Mexperience.mx.

For more information about internet services in Mexico, connect to our guide to Communications in Mexico.

An important feature of the festivities is the creation of an ofrenda – an offering – that usually manifests as an alter in Catholic homes; placing upon this photographs of the remembered dead, accompanied by a number of traditional foods and decorations, including caramelized pumpkin, small sugar skulls, and orange marigold flowers called cempaxochitl, or Flor de Muerto.

Another traditional food oftentimes found on ofrendas is Pan de Muerto: literally translated, Bread of the Dead; colloquially, ‘Dead Bread’.  This bread is sold by most bakers (and all supermarkets) only in the weeks leading up to Day of the Dead.  As of November 3rd, the bread disappears, save for a few loaves that might linger.

Like Easter Eggs, or Turkey Dinner at Thanksgiving, Dead Bread is a treat that people look forward to and miss when its season passes.  Of course, this passing of availability is the essential ingredient that creates its lasting allure: another example of how scarcity can make things attractive and endows them with some intrinsic value.

Dead Bread is like any other bread, except that it has a few treats added into the mixture which serve to make it special.  The generous amounts of butter employed in its making, accompanied by a citrus glaze and a good helping of sugar crystals dusted on top make this particular loaf a high-calorie sweet feast – that, when fresh, also happens to melt deliciously on the tongue.

A remarkable feature of the bread is the presence of “bones”, formed from the same mixture, and laid over the dome-shaped dough. These give the bread a somewhat macabre look, but rest well with the theme it represents.

The recipe, that can be easily found online, is quite simple. The succulent citrusy undertones are bestowed by the bread’s glaze, that is made using the zest from a fresh orange, and its juice.

The bread is best when taken on the same day it was baked, accompanied with a cup of hot chocolate, made the Mexican way (add ground cinnamon to the chocolate).  One of the long-standing traditions of people who attend the graves of their loved ones now deceased, is to take Pan de Muerto and drink Mexican hot chocolate; usually after dark, when the cool November temperatures begin to make their presence felt in the night air.

Dead Bread is one of those Mexican foods which many foreigners have yet to try. If you live in Mexico, then you’ll know (or come to know) about Day of the Dead and taste the delicious bread that accompanies this important festival.  If you are visiting Mexico, you’ll be able to obtain Pan de Muerto from baker’s shelves as of early October each year.

Officially, the clocks in Mexico will be turned back by one hour at precisely 0200 (2am) on Sunday, October 25th.  Europe too, will turn its clocks back by one hour on this date, but the USA will not end its Daylight Saving Time (DST) until Sunday, November 1.

Last spring, Mexico, Europe and the USA moved their clock time forward by one hour on three different weekends, creating a staggered schedule that required some careful working-out by anyone who happened to be traveling between – or working with colleagues – across these countries and continents.

This autumn, Europe and Mexico are moving their clocks forward in tandem, so the autumn clock-time change schedule is thus simpler:

On Sunday October 25th, Mexico and Europe will move their clock time back by one hour.  Mexico will thus remain six hours behind the UK, Ireland and Portugal and seven hours behind other Western European countries.  However, Mexico will be an additional hour behind US time zones until November 1st so, for example, instead of Mexico being one hour behind New York (Eastern Time) it will be two hours behind New York.

On Sunday November 1st, the United States will end its DST and move its clock time back by one hour. On this date, Mexico’s clocks will, once again, be back to their normal clock-time synchronization with the USA’s Time Zones.

Mexico has three Clock Time Zones, and one state that does not adhere to the DST protocol.

Most of Mexico, including Mexico City and Merida, adheres to Central Time (same as Dallas, TX).

Baja California Sur and the coastal areas north of Nuevo Vallarta adhere to Mountain Time (same as Denver, CO); which is one hour behind Mexico City.  Puerto Vallarta remains on Central Time, but Punta de Mita, just 25 miles north, is on Mountain Time. Mazatlan is also on Mountain Time.

The northern reaches of Baja California adhere to Pacific Time (same as Los Angeles, CA).  In this relatively small area of Mexican territory, which includes the towns of San Felipe and Ensenada, the clocks are one hour behind Baja California Sur and two hours behind Mexico City.

The exception is Mexico’s northern state of Sonora.  As Sonora borders the state of Arizona (one the few US states which do not adhere to the DST protocol), Sonora chooses to leave its clock time unchanged, in harmony with its northern neighbor.

You can learn more about Mexico’s three time zones and annual clock changes on the Mexperience Travel Essentials guide.

If you’re planning to visit Mexico on vacation, or for longer periods – perhaps for living or retirement – it’s worth getting acquainted with the different geographical areas which make up the country’s terrain.  The local climate will influence a location’s characteristics and attractions, and so choosing the right terrain is an important part of the decision-making process, especially if you’re planning to live, retire or buy property here.

A location’s climate patterns depend upon the combination of its geographical latitude and its altitude above sea level.  Mexico has three distinct ‘land types’, and these are denoted in Spanish as Tierra Caliente, Tierra Templada and Tierra Fria.

Tierra Caliente – hot lands – comprise of those areas which range from sea level to around 750 meters (2,460 feet) above sea level.  These lands are predominantly found along coastal plains which extend out from mountain ranges which descend into the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of Mexico; in the country’s northern deserts; the lowlands on the Baja Peninsula; the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (between the state of Oaxaca and the Yucatan Peninsula); and the Yucatan Peninsula proper.

Tierra Templada – temperate lands – are those which lie at between 750 meters and 2,300 meters (7,545 feet) above sea level.  These include most of Mexico’s beautiful colonial cities, as well as the country’s three big cities: Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

Tierra Fria – cold lands – are those places extending 2,300 meters above sea level.  In Mexico, these lands comprise of mountain ranges and some volcanoes, and Pico de Orizaba, the highest peak in Mexico and the second-highest peak in North America.

Tierras Calientes offer year-round warmth; but get very hot and, south of the Tropic of Cancer, humid during the rainy season (May to October).  Choose these areas if you want to vacation (or live) in a year-round warm climate, but be aware that summers can get extremely hot and be accompanied by drenching humidity in places.  Some people choose to visit or live in these areas only during the autumn and winter, when the temperature is more moderate and humidity subdued.

Most of Mexico’s temperate climates are to be found inland – up in the mountains.  Tierras Templadas offer, as the name suggests, a mild and moderated climate all year-round.  However, late autumn and winter can get cool, cold, and sometimes very cold; and during these seasons the daytime high temperatures (which can reach mid 70’sF/23C) can collapse sharply overnight to drop below freezing (32F/0C).  The rainy season, May to October, tends to finish abruptly, and the dry season is very dry indeed.

Mexico doesn’t have too many towns and villages in regions classed as Tierras Frias: those at least 7,500 feet above sea level.  There do exist some settlements – usually populated by long-standing indigenous residents – at these very high altitudes.  However, most people who come to Mexico experience these places only on certain mountain hikes and expeditions into Mexico’s wilderness.

For more information about visiting and living in places situated at high altitude in Mexico, read Breathing Easy at High Altitudes and Why 7,000 Feet Can’t Deliver a Free Lunch.

There are currently ten statutory national holidays in Mexico; however, only nine are observed annually; the tenth one, on December 1, is only observed every six years, on the occasion of a Presidential inauguration.

Where a statutory holiday date falls on a weekend day in any given year, no additional compensation is given (by law) to employees, although companies may offer a day-off in lieu.

In 2006, Mexico’s Congress passed a new law creating ‘Bank Holiday Mondays’ – modelled on public holidays observed in the UK – whereby three of the ten existing holiday dates are observed on the nearest Monday, creating longer, three-day, weekends.   The move was particularly welcomed by Mexico’s tourism industry (domestic tourism generates some US$8bn worth of trade each year) as well other retail and leisure businesses which have bolstered their trade through the advent of these long weekends.

Notwithstanding the three long weekends brought about by law, Mexicans have long been expert in creating ‘bridges’ with their holiday dates: taking additional days either side of a holiday date to create a longer period of rest.

Official public holidays see banks, offices and factories closing their doors.  However, leisure facilities, tourism services and many shopping centers in bigger towns and cities remain open for business.  They must, however, pay their workers double-time for working on national holidays.  Many of the better employers pay double-time and, additionally, give their employees a day-off in lieu.

Mexico observes a good number of Civic Holidays, too.  These are not national holidays, although the law does allow for some states and municipalities to observe these Civic dates locally.  The Battle of Puebla, more commonly referred to as Cinco de Mayo, is a good example of a Civic Holiday that is observed in the state of Puebla, but nowhere else in Mexico.

Some annual events, like Day of the Dead, are enormous cultural events in Mexico; and although these may be better attended than some of the Statutory and Civic Holidays, they are not observed under current Mexican law.

If you’re planning to visit Mexico, make a note of the public holidays as these dates often provide an opportunity to witness interesting cultural and historical events as well participate in lively parties and festivities.  It’s also essential to book ahead of time, as Mexicans often plan their own vacations around these dates: expect airplanes, buses and hotel rooms to fill up.

You can find a guide to Mexico’s Public Holidays on Mexperience.