• Bazar del Sábado in San Angel: This festive Saturday market in and around Plaza San Jacinto in colonial San Angel, one of Mexico City's more exclusive southern neighborhoods, offers exceptional crafts of a more sophisticated nature than you'll see in most mercados. Furnishings, antiques, and collectibles are also easy to find in surrounding shops and street plazas.
  • Polanco, Mexico City: This fashionable neighborhood is noted for its designer boutiques, formal dress shops, fine jewelers, and leather-goods offerings. Avenida Presidente Masaryk is Mexico City's equivalent of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills or the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
  • Calle Colima, Mexico City: This street has a variety of boutiques and skate shops where the hip Chilangos go to procure their outfits for Saturday night or pick out their new sneakers.
  • Contemporary Art: Latin American art is surging in popularity. Galleries in Mexico City feature Mexico's masters and emerging stars. Oaxaca, Puerto Vallarta, and San Miguel de Allende galleries have excellent selections.
  • Taxco Silver: Mexico's silver capital, Taxco, has hundreds of stores featuring fine jewelry and decorative objects.
  • Talavera Pottery in Puebla & Dolores Hidalgo: An inheritor of the Moorish legacy of ceramics, Puebla produces some of the most sought-after dinnerware in the world. Tiles produced there adorn building facades and church domes throughout the area. Dolores Hidalgo, 40km (25 miles) northwest of San Miguel de Allende, has attractive, inexpensive, and less traditional Talavera.
  • San Miguel de Allende's Diverse Crafts: Perhaps it's the influence of the Instituto Allende art school, but something has made storekeepers here savvy about their merchandise. The stores have fewer typical articles of Mexican handicrafts and more interesting and eye-catching works than in other towns.
  • Pátzcuaro's Fine Crafts: Michoacán is known for its crafts, and Pátzcuaro is at the center of it all. You can find beautiful cotton textiles, woodcarvings, pottery, lacquerware, woven straw pieces, and copper items in the market, or you can track the object to its source in one of the nearby villages.
  • Decorative Arts in Tlaquepaque & Tonalá: These two neighborhoods of Guadalajara offer perhaps the most enjoyable shopping in Mexico. Tlaquepaque has attracted sophisticated and wide-ranging shops that sell a wide variety of decorative art. More than 400 artisans have workshops in Tonalá, and you can visit many of them; on market days, wander through blocks and blocks of market stalls to find that one perfect piece.
  • Oaxacan Textiles: The valley of Oaxaca produces the best weavings and naturally dyed textiles in Mexico; it's also famous for its pottery and colorful, imaginative woodcarvings.
  • San Cristóbal de las Casas: Deep in the heart of the Maya highlands, San Cristóbal has shops, open plazas, and markets that feature the distinctive waist-loomed wool and cotton textiles of the region, as well as leather shoes, handsome pottery, amber jewelry, and Guatemalan textiles. Highland Maya Indians sell direct to tourists from their armloads of textiles, pottery, and woodcarvings.
  • Huichol Art in Puerto Vallarta: One of the last indigenous cultures to remain faithful to their customs, language, and traditions, the Huichol Indians come down from the Sierra Madre to sell their unusual art to Puerto Vallarta galleries. Inspired by visions received during spiritual ceremonies, the Huichol create their art with colorful yarn or beads pressed into wax.

Note: This information was accurate when it was published, but can change without notice. Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the companies in question before planning your trip.