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San Miguel’s cosmetic surgery retreat now welcomes spa goers
by Anne Dimon, from Travel to Wellness
For the last 15 years, Casa Marino, a Spanish Colonial home in a quiet, residential neighbourhood of San Miguel de Allende, has been a vacation retreat for cosmetic surgery patients. Following a three-night hospital stay, “guests usually stay here for about a week,” says co-owner and certified yoga instructor Malinda Marino.
Over the years, this Miami/San Miguel mother and daughter business, known as Face Lift Mexico, has been offering guests accommodations and recuperative spa treatments and yoga sessions, and now they have opened their doors to visitors and residents of San Miguel as Esencia Yoga Spa Retreat.
Marino, a certified Bikram Yoga instructor, who moved here about six and a half years ago says, “we want to set ourselves apart from the many, many spas here in San Miguel.” Marino, see herself as a caregiver, and tells me she wants “to offer luxury at affordable prices.”
And, the prices (noted here in U.S. dollars) are definitely on the affordable side: A pedicure is about $20 and you can add a 90- minute reflexology treatment to that for an additional $15. Excellent value. A 60- minute facial is less than $60, as is the Deep Tissue or Lymphatic Massage. The two-hour body treatments are under $150. The environment is more homey than what you’d expect of a spa and that is what the owners intended – a comfortable, relaxed environment for recuperation.
Upon entering, you remove your shoes (a selection of reusable slippers is provided), make your way past the kitchen, through the living room which acts as a waiting area, and up the stairs to three private guestrooms, a mani/pedi area with a stone fireplace and, just beyond, a yoga studio that does double duty as a treatment room, as required.
Mostly, treatments are offered in the privacy of one of three quest rooms. That’s, of course, if they are not housing cosmetic surgery guests. The larger guestroom opens out onto a terrace, and all guests have access to a rooftop sun deck with lounge chairs, a sunken whirlpool and a lovely view of the neighbourhood.
This mother and daughter-run business will continue to offer accommodations and care for cosmetic surgery patients, but now the public will also have access to their spa services and yoga classes.
From here it’s about a 15 minute walk to the Plaza Principal in the heart of San Miguel.
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Read review in Travel to Wellness
Visit Esencia Yoga Spa Retreat Site
Article from Mittie Roger’s Blog on Jan 11, 2012
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Driving through Los Piccachos, a mountain range that is home to the volcano Palo Huerfano, I found myself pondering the pyramids I was about to see and reminding myself that they were made without the aid of beasts of burden, without machines, or even metal tools. The Cañada de la Virgen is a recently discovered archeological site outside San Miguel de Allende. My tour leader, Albert Coffee, an expert in Mesoamerican archeology that assisted the excavation of the ruins, preferred to say it was “rediscovered” by outsiders. The locals never forgot that it existed.
Cañada de la Virgen
Due to the volcano looming over the valley, the ancient peoples had fertile soil, sharp obsidian to make tools and a several types of stone, including basalt and cantera that could be used to build the pyramids. But natural resources weren’t the only thing these highly sophisticated people had going for them. Since 5000 B.C. they understood the symbiotic relationship between corn, beans and squash, which when grown together provide just the right combination of everything from growing conditions to human health. Moreover, their knowledge of astronomy and architecture is astounding.
One of the Sunken Patios used for celestial observation and ceremonies.
Coffee explained the “horizon clock” which (among other things) aligns the sunrise on two specific days a year: planting and harvest. The sunken patio structure of the pyramids allows for natural reflection-pool observatories to chart the movements of planets and stars. The ancient people mirrored the terrain and cosmos in their architecture, lining up landmarks as well as equinoxes with certain points in the pyramid’s structure. “I consider myself an interpreter for the people who, now, can’t talk for themselves,” Coffee said.
The steps leading up to the pyramid
We side-stepped up the steep temple steps where from the top we had a perfect view of the landmarks and their synchronicity with the pre-Columbian constructions like the house of the winds, house of the rain and botanical gardens scattered with fragments of earth-toned pottery. While there are theories about who built the pyramids, Coffee isn’t convinced that all the evidence stacks up to one clear answer. So who does he believe built them? Only more research may tell.
The view from the pyramid
Albert Coffee’s tour, a part of Coyote Canyon Adventure Tours, was undoubtedly the best experience I’ve had visiting archeological ruins. It rivaled Phaestos in Crete, Larabanga in Ghana, and Macchu Picchu in Peru if for nothing more than the vast knowledge of details from the ancient practices to the modern context of the site that Coffee shared with us. Had I paid my money and walked around the grounds reading all the signs (which was what I had originally planned to do) I would have received only a fraction of the wealth of information he had to offer. Next on the agenda? His tour that ends in a tequila tasting!
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The news from Mexico, in recent years, has most often been bad. For a while, it was largely reports of corruption, electoral fraud and economic crisis. These days, it’s all about crime and insecurity.
The country hasn’t been given sufficient credit for the good news it has generated since the 2000 elections broke the 71-year hegemony of a single party: the Institutional Revolutionary Party, better known as the PRI. Neither the international press nor we Mexicans have fully acknowledged what has been achieved or maintained. Still, Mexico’s dark image is valid, up to a point, but it’s only a fragment of the truth.
Corruption in government, for instance, has by no means disappeared. Yet in stark contrast to the long period of PRI domination (1929-2000), it has greatly diminished at the federal level, thanks to the 2002 Federal Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. Mexico is now a democracy, with a true division of powers, full democratic freedoms and elections supervised by an independent electoral institute.
The economy (MXGCTOT) also has shown notable advances. After serious crises in 1976, 1982, 1988 and 1994, the country has learned its lessons, demonstrated resilience and developed a civil service that can maintain stability in the shifting world economy.
— Deep Problems —
Nonetheless, Mexico’s problems run deep and some seem almost insoluble. And, for the time being, they will surely continue to produce the kind of bad news that we have grown accustomed to reading on the world’s front pages. It would be absurd (and impossible) to ignore these dark areas, but in the interest of truth — and in keeping with the Christmas spirit — it seems fair to list some of contemporary Mexico’s strengths.
Much of our planet is convulsed with conflicts based on race, regionalism or culture. Mexico, on the whole, isn’t. Our culture is generally inclusive. Almost the entire population of the country is mestizo, of mixed origin, American Indian and Spanish. In some areas (and in some minds), lingering bigotry toward “Indians” persists, but it is by no means widespread.
Instead, Mexico displays a cultural inclusiveness in major and minor matters, in our cuisine, in the names of our streets and villages, in our art and in the nature of our religious practices. Racism, where it exists in Mexico, cannot even be remotely compared to the strain in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. Consider, for example, that while Evo Morales of Bolivia became the first indigenous president in Latin America only relatively recently, Mexico installed Benito Juarez — of indigenous origin and a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, whose moral and historical stature wasn’t dissimilar — as president in 1858.
And Mexico today doesn’t suffer from any acute religious conflicts. Our 19th century was strongly marked by the divisions between often anti-clerical (though not necessarily anti- religious) Liberals and generally pro-Church Conservatives in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Even now, less than 90 percent of Mexicans identify themselves as Catholic.
But under the leadership of Juarez, starting with the Liberal victory in the War of Reform (1858-61) and the Reform Laws that followed, Mexico chose to separate church and state and to enshrine freedom of religion in legislation.
In recent times, except for the bloody Cristiada uprising of the 1920s, when Catholic peasants (mostly in the west of Mexico) rebelled against the anti-clerical measures of President Plutarco Elias Calles, religion hasn’t been an important source of discord. In contrast with some other Latin American countries, the division between church and state has been an enduring strength.
— Religious Pluralism —
Despite the overwhelming numerical predominance of one religion, Mexico is tolerant of religious diversity. Protestantism has made advances in the last few years, a trend that is especially clear in some poorer states such as Chiapas (which has a large indigenous population) or the southeast states of Tabasco, Quintana Roo and Campeche (with a majority of recent migrant populations). In Chiapas, in particular, less than 70 percent of the population is still Catholic. We are witnessing, within the context of religious freedom, a quiet and generally peaceful evolution toward religious pluralism.
Many Mexicans, especially if they are young, now attend fewer church services than their parents or grandparents did. But the old piety still holds, inculcated from childhood, handed down from mother to child. People of every occupation, even criminals, have their patron saint. And the Virgin of Guadalupe, a symbol of the nation, draws millions of worshippers, from all over the country and all social classes, to her shrine north of Mexico City on her feast day of Dec. 12.
The Mexican family, with its strong binding force, enhances social cohesion. And though women are still burdened with relics of machismo, their role is evolving. From the absolutely central position they have long had within the structure of the family, women are entering the labor market in increasing numbers, sometimes as the family’s sole source of income. And they are steadily advancing in the country’s political, cultural and economic life, often taking important leadership roles. Even the massive migration to the U.S. (where there are now almost 20 million people of Mexican origin, compared with about 5 million in the 1970s) reflects certain strengths of our culture. Immigrants remain closely attached to their families in Mexico and send for them when they can. In contrast with earlier immigrants, they rarely give up their language (although most also want to learn English), or their religion (especially a devotion to their local saint), or a taste for the food and customs of their region.
Mexico is a country that measures its time in centuries and even in millennia, but not in the same way as Egypt or Greece.
In this sense, it is perhaps more like India. Both are complex countries blessed by and burdened with history. Like India, Mexico is premodern, modern, postmodern and antimodern. And sometimes it is all of those things at the same time.
Such cultural wealth is a great asset. And despite our real problems (especially crime and poverty), if we can finally confront and subdue what is wrong with us and continue to expand the economy — within a democratic framework — our nation could retain the strengths of its past while moving toward the future.
(Enrique Krauze, the author of “Mexico: Biography of Power” and “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. This article was translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz.)
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