JOHN SIMPSON

Why San Cristobal, and not Cancun or Acapulco? I’ve only got to walk across the dark red tiled floor of my hotel room and look out of the casemented window to get the answer. Far away, along the line of the charming cobbled street with its single-storeyed tiled houses in pastel yellows and ochres, I can see the hills that surround this place; and beyond them lie the finest forests, mountain ranges, canyons and waterfalls in the whole of Mexico. The concrete towers of Cancun and Acapulco don’t, I promise you, begin to compare.

At 7,000ft, the air here has a sharpness that makes you feel better and more energetic the moment you step off the plane. San Cristobal is a place where you can forget the Mexicans’ famous self-mockery: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Here, Mexico is itself: sprawling, relaxed, and true to its past.

The past is one of the reasons I’m here. The city’s full name is San Cristobal de Las Casas, and the cathedral here was founded in 1545 by Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas, one of the most interesting figures in Latin American history. In April 1493, as a young Spaniard of 18, Las Casas joined the crowds cheering Christopher Columbus as he paraded triumphantly through the streets of Seville after his return from his first epoch-making voyage to the New World. In 1502, Las Casas, a tough and effective soldier of 27, sailed to Cuba himself and was rewarded for his good service with a big estate, which had plenty of indigenous Indian slaves. Then something happened to him. He witnessed a massacre of Indians by Spanish soldiers, and that changed the entire direction of his life. He decided to join the Church, and in 1513 he became probably the first priest to be ordained in the Americas.

In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the Atlantic, arguing the cause of the Indians in Spain and trying to build settlements in the New World where Indians and Spaniards could live peacefully together. He grew more and more outspoken over the way the Indians were treated, and his short temper often got him into trouble. But his sympathy and love for the Indians grew even stronger over the years. And in spite of all the dangers and difficulties he went through, he lived to be 92.

At a mere 71, he founded the cathedral here. The 16th-century building was pulled down quite soon afterwards, but in the 18th century a new cathedral was built. This has now been restored in all its Baroque glory, its frontage to the city’s main square bubbling over with decoration and the statues of saints.

I wandered into the cathedral with my producer and camera crew without making any appointment. We came across a pleasant young priest who, I suppose, recognised my affection for the old boy. Without a word, he led us into a side room where a dozen full-length oil paintings were stacked up carefully in the corner. As the cameraman filmed him, he checked through the paintings and pulled one out. Then he stood it up against the wall.

There was Bishop Bartolomé himself, as large as life, looking out at me. A bit fierce, perhaps, but you didn’t yell at the King of Spain in his own court about the abuses of human rights being committed in his name unless you were moderately determined. And at the same time, the love and humanity shone in his eyes. This, after all, was the man who looked at a group of Indian refugees with such affection that “... it caused me pity and great compassion, considering their meekness, humility and poverty, and what they had suffered, their banishment and weariness, brought upon them by no fault of their own”.

Bishop Bartolomé was a one-man Amnesty International, recording the savageries committed against the Indians and publishing them at his own expense. He had great faults: his solution to the evils of enslaving the Indians was to encourage more slavery from Africa. That, of course, was simply exchanging one wickedness for another. Maybe he felt obliged to come up with a solution to the Indian problem, whatever it might be; maybe he didn’t have the imagination to understand how appalling the African slave trade would become.

In the last 20 years, the state of Chiapas, where San Cristobal is situated, has undergone an extraordinary upheaval: it has been the epicentre of a quiet revolution by a movement known as the Zapatistas, which has caused virtually no bloodshed. The Zapatista leader, the pipe-smoking, and balaclava-masked sub-comandante Marcos, rode into town on his horse in January 1994. The horse picked its way across the cathedral square, and Marcos walked into the cathedral and opened negotiations with leading Mexican officials. Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, a follower of Las Casas, chaired the talks.

Ever since, peace has reigned in Chiapas. When I asked a group of Zapatista guerrillas deep in the lush forests outside San Cristobal whether they would shoot at the Mexican army, they seemed quite shocked. “That is not how we operate,” one said. And when I looked round I realized that, although they wore jungle-green uniforms and regulation balaclavas, they didn’t actually have any guns.

So go to Cancun or Acapulco if you want. But you won’t be seeing the real Mexico; all you’ll see is a charming, identikit holiday resort and a lot of concrete. You’d have a much more interesting time if you went to San Cristobal, and followed in the footsteps of Las Casas and sub-comandante Marcos.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.