Every year during the festivities of Semana Santa (Holy Week — Easter), Uruapan, Michoacan is host to a large, bustling and highly colorful fair that features much of the variety of fabulous arts and crafts available from the many crafts-producing towns and municipalities of the state. It is considered one of the most enduring and largest fairs in which artisans compete for prizes for the best and most adept execution of design and craftsmanship in a number of popular art categories, amongst which figure fine regional textiles and embroidery, wood carving, copper work, pottery and ceramics, basketry and other woven crafts.
During the course of the fair, the main plaza of Uruapan is covered in tarps and converted into an enormous marketplace. It and neighboring courtyards and plazas hum with the barter of traditionally-garbed vendors and the excited activity of the browsers and hopeful buyers. Moving through the narrow aisles lined with stacks of fragile pottery, it is not at all uncommon to hear native Purepecha mixed with the Spanish banter. There are stretches of natural reddish-brown clay and green-glazed pottery, pineapple urns from the municipality of Tangancicuaro, painted plates and bowls from Capula, straw and reed work from the shores of Lake Patzcuaro, copperwork from Santa Clara del Cobre and quantities of handmade coconut sweets and natural fruit leathers called “ates” that are yet another of the specialties of the state of Michoacan, Mexico. Women sit on short stools in front of gay displays of blouses and dresses decorated with arrays of flowers and birds, embroidering even more goods as they sell those they have already completed.
It is said that the Uruapan crafts fair dates from prehispanic times when the Purepechas and other regional groups gathered year to year in Uruapan to trade their goods, and that with the arrival of the Spaniards, the date was changed to fall on Palm Sunday. The fair now extends all the way through the Easter holidays and beyond. In 2010 dates for the Uruapan Tianguis Artesanal were March 23rd through April 11th.
References: http://turismomichoacan.gob.mx
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