Guadalajara, Mexico

Guadalajara is where Mexico keeps its self-image. Mariachi was born in Jalisco and holds its world summit here each September; tequila ripens in the blue agave fields an hour west, with the town of its name at the end of a tourist railway; charrería, the national horsemanship, performs in the city's rings — the trinity of Mexican iconography, all local. The historic centre answers with stone: the cathedral's twin yellow-tiled spires, and in the Hospicio Cabañas — the UNESCO-listed former orphanage — José Clemente Orozco's murals, crowned by the "Man of Fire" burning in the chapel dome, one of the summits of Mexican art.

The city's opera house is the Teatro Degollado, a neoclassical horseshoe of 1866 with Apollo and the muses on its pediment, home of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco — theatre and orchestra both documented in the concert record, together with PALCCO, the modern performing-arts palace in neighbouring Zapopan, the metropolitan area's newer hall (its location flagged for the workbook). Each December the FIL, the largest Spanish-language book fair on earth, makes Guadalajara the capital of the written word as well. Mariachi, murals, tequila and a philharmonic: Guadalajara is the republic's second city and its first self-portrait.