Barros de México

Inside Barros de México, a shop specializing in plant pots and garden sculptures

A peculiarity of living in Oaxaca (and perhaps, more broadly, Mexico) is that businesses do not rely on Google Maps. This has a lot to do with mobile data costs (a subject I’ll tackle later which is worthy of true, sourced journalistic investigation) and the end result is that businesses either don’t exist on Google Maps at all, or if they do they are categorized incorrectly, have the wrong hours listed, or aren’t where the map says they’re supposed to be. This makes it not just hard to navigate but also, as a new resident, hard to figure out where you can actually buy the stuff you want and need.

The inconvenience has an upside though, because it requires you to actually explore, in a car and on foot, and to ask your friends and neighbors about the best spots to find things like floor tile; bread; cleaning supplies; fresh, locally roasted (and grown!) coffee; and plants and plant pots, which in Mexico are called ‘macetas.’

Because we are friends with Penny and Victor, the people we bought our new house from, and because they’ve shown an interest in making sure we’re comfortable (and also maybe suspect that early expat naïveté may result in our lifeless bodies being fished out of the local aqueduct) they’ve given us a great many recommendations and considerable assistance and translation help. When we asked them where we should go for plant pots their answer was immediate: Barros de México.