Veracruz

Noche de Brujas: a guide to Mexico’s Night of the Witches

Location: Cerro Mono Blanco, Catemaco, Mexico

Noche de Brujas: Night of the Witches

If witches and wizards have a spiritual home it may well be the Mexican town of Catemaco, a pretty place on the shore of Laguna Catemaco considered the centre of Mexico’s witchcraft and witch-doctor industry. Witchcraft traditions in this part of Mexico go back centuries, mixing ancient indigenous beliefs, Spanish medieval traditions and voodoo practices from West Africa, and in 1970 a local brujo (shaman) had the grand idea to host a witchcraft convention. The idea stuck and now every year hundreds of shamans, witches and healers from all over Mexico descend on Catemaco to perform a mass cleansing ceremony designed to rid them of the previous year’s negative energies.

Taking place at a suitably witching hour on Cerro Mono Blanco, a hill just outside of town, the occasion is less ooga-booga than it sounds – you should expect more Bewitched than The Blair Witch Project, with the event having become very commercial and conscious of the tourism that has sprung up around it. Floods of visitors head into town looking to grab a shamanic consultation and to eat, drink and be merry in a bizarre mix of otherworldly fervour and hedonistic indulgence.