When friends visiting Mexico for the first time ask me where to begin, I tell them: Go to Oaxaca, one of the most scenically beautiful, historically interesting and simply enjoyable cities south of the border. Go now. It’s never seemed more important than it does at this current moment, to enjoy, to admire and to learn about our nation’s near neighbor to the south.

I can’t think of a better way to counter the “alternative facts” we have been hearing in the political discourse about Mexico and Mexicans than to go there and see for ourselves, to experience firsthand the country’s physical beauty, its rich traditions, the hospitality and kindness of its people. And I can’t think of a better place to start than Oaxaca, an easy trip of less than an hour, by air, from Mexico City. At least partly because of its pleasant climate, temperate all year round, Oaxaca has become an appealing tourist destination.

A lovely colonial city that has been designated by Unesco as a World Heritage Site, located in the scenic highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur, Oaxaca (where archaeological ruins, churches and museums range across the centuries of the country’s past) offers a concentrated education in Mexico’s culture and complex heritage, an immersion course sweetened by a succession of pleasures and delights — brightly colored houses, pleasant public squares and stately churches, all set in the midst of a gorgeous desert landscape.