San Cristobal de las Casas has nearly 50 churches for about 250,000 souls. Here the church bells in the Spanish colonial belfries don't toll exactly. They bang the same tinny note insistently in quick succession, seeming to say to the faithful, "Get your sinful souls to this church right now."
The town seems as well endowed with hotels as churches. They cater for the many American and European back-packers increasingly drawn to the sexiness of Zapatistismo, particularly in the threatened Lacondona rainforest outside town, and to this apparently tranquil jewel in Chiapas's spectacular highlands.
Antique and modern, rich and miserably poor all at once, this "city" has almost every kind of shop or service you could think of, even a cyber cafe - gyms, a sports club, excellent Spanish language schools and an ancient Turkish baths with the aroma of steaming eucalyptus leaves. Even new buildings in its paved streets follow the Spanish colonial style, with patios surrounded by pillars.
Like many Mexican settlements it's set in a saucer-like valley encircled by mountains. Dabs of cloud cover the tree-lined summits, as if created by some Mayan painter.
But it is the sense of the bizarre, the absurd, that takes the stranger unawares. In the colonial cathedral, whose beams are supported by 16 tall Corinthian pillars, a candle is burning to a lifesize Christ figure walking painfully on his hands and knees. But I notice that the candle wax drips in a barman's tray carrying the legend "Canada Dry".
Persistent tiny kid beggars even drift into the cathedral or the restaurants. "Un peso, un peso? Por mi tortilla..." Slightly older ones, with a little wooden box of tricks, insist you need a shoeshine. And they are experts. In the evening they go to a special school, they assure me.
Poor indigenous Mayan women and children, in traditional dress, sit on pavements selling their colourful handcrafts. They live in communities outside town in which the long-eared donkey is still a beast of burden and babies are bound to their mothers' backs.
As the Indian women sit into the night on the pavement they might also be twisting threads to make Sub Comandante Marcos or Ramona dolls for the tourists. A permanent Zapatista stage behind the cathedral proclaims the road to a new Jerusalem with "democracia, libertad, justicia y tierra". With 26 per cent of the state officially a "conflict zone" the town's intrinsic racism is being challenged.
Traditionally the main power group is the coletos, so called because the original Spaniards sported a coleto, or pigtail. Nowadays it's a fashion among San Cristobal's alternative set, some of whom have found their way from Boston or Brittany to run bookshops, art galleries or non-governmental organisations.
San Cristobal has about 20 different names for its racial mixtures. There are authenticos, who claim descent from the coletos. They run the place. In the 16th century there were gachupines (Spaniards born in Europe), criollos (Spaniards born in the Americas), or mestizos. Originally this term was for a mixture of Spanish Americans and real Spaniards.
Nowadays it is used for mixtures of Indian and ladino blood. In Chiapas ladino just means white people living among non-white people. But in Central America it is a term of abuse for the white ruling class which traces its roots back to Spain.
In San Cristobal de las Casas racism and radicalism are side by side. It was the town Graham Greene's "whisky priest" in The Power and the Glory was trying to reach from godless Tabasco state in the aftermath of Mexico's 1910-17 revolution. Chiapas was safer for priests then because the revolution never got here.
In these times constant fireworks imitate a revolution going off. The churches each have a week-long fiesta to celebrate their anniversaries. That means fireworks nearly every night of the year. How would we know if it was a real revolution? "No hay problema. Tranquilo," I am assured. The real ones don't make a little hiss just before exploding. But in spite of fiestas Mexicans here and elsewhere work every hour that God and man can give.
The waiters in La Diligencia wear earphones and mikes to pass on orders with maximum speed. You might notice a man using the horse as personal transport alongside macho gas-guzzlers, or the popular VW Beetle, which Mexico has reinvented at a huge factory in Puebla.
The rockets that turn to bangers in the night sky mingle with the barking of San Cristobal's considerable stray dog population. Roosters join the cacophony at about 4.15 a.m., only encouraging the ubiquitous Mexican mongrel, usually a brown nondescript-looking thing with a collapsed belly.
Like Catalonia in Spain, Chiapas has a separatist streak in its history. After Mexican independence in 1821 Chiapas's feudal leaders opted briefly to join neighbouring Guatemala. That - and its constant stream of cute foreigners only looking for trouble - is part of why I call San Cristobal de las Casas the Barcelona of the Americas.