Old paint layers show Tapalpa's houses were once blue, yellow and salmon, an INAH-backed study finds

Before white walls took over in Tapalpa, the facades of its houses and buildings carried colors of their own. A research project led by the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), with support from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), has worked out which shades were used on the historic buildings of the town in the southern highlands of Jalisco, INAH said on November 10. Blue came up most often, ahead of yellow and salmon.

The project, “Tapalpa en colores” (Tapalpa in colors), began in 2025 inside ITESO's regional tourism cluster, coordinated by Mauricio Margules Sevilla. INAH describes its goal as rebuilding the town's color history from three kinds of evidence: what survives on the walls, historical documents and the memories of residents. According to the bulletin, Tapalpa's name in Nahuatl means place of colored earth.

What the survey found

According to the bulletin, Paula Melina Coleman Orozco, one of the project's cultural managers, reported that the team reviewed 74 buildings. On 22 of them it found what the project calls calas naturales, spots where older paint already shows through. Blue was the most common color on those buildings, found on nine, with yellow on seven and salmon on six. Six buildings had modern paint or had been remodeled, so no older coats could be seen, although the bulletin says that does not rule out that they once had them.

In a second phase, led by the restorer Farirah León, the team made 12 stratigraphic test openings, small windows through the successive coats, in seven buildings. Reading the layers allowed the team to settle which historic colors should be kept, and it uncovered patinas in blue, yellow, salmon, pink, cream and green.

Paint made from earth and nopal

The researchers also gathered soil of different colors to make paint, testing several processes and ingredients. One binder was water with nopal mucilage, which thickens the longer it stands. INAH counts seven earth colors in the municipality: white, yellow, salmon, green, purple, red and gray. Architect Oda Jadi Lamas Vázquez, who supervised the work for INAH, said the test openings were made on heritage buildings considered historic monuments, and that the project also brings back the old way of painting walls with lime and natural earths.

Rather than painting their homes white and red, residents once went out to the countryside for pigment and picked whatever color suited them at the time, according to the project's supervisor, Robertho González Toscano, who lives in Tapalpa.

How the colors were lost

Written records are scarce, so the team interviewed residents and regular visitors about how colors were prepared, applied and chosen. Putting those accounts together with the paint layers, a few documents and the history of vinyl paint in Mexico, the researchers believe Tapalpa's residents were still using that range of colors in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

INAH attributes the change to policies of the second half of the 20th century that pursued a uniform look in towns considered traditional. The result was white facades with brown guardapolvos, the painted band along the foot of a wall, a look that grew stronger after Tapalpa was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2002. Violence also played a part: in 1915 the town was burned and destroyed in an attack the bulletin attributes to Pedro Zamora, known as El Zorro de Jalisco.

What has not been announced

The bulletin does not say whether any facade will be repainted in the recovered colors, when that might happen or who would pay, and it does not mention any change to rules on how buildings may be painted. INAH's Jalisco office supplied Tapalpa's catalog of historic monuments, which the team used to choose the buildings where a permit was needed before opening test windows. The municipal seat holds 90% of the municipality's heritage buildings, the bulletin says.

For Jalisco, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) “advises against all but essential travel to the areas south and south-west of Lake Chapala to the border with the state of Colima”, and to 11 northern municipalities it names. Tapalpa is not among those 11, but the FCDO's text names no towns within the Lake Chapala area, so it does not say whether Tapalpa lies inside that area; the same page links a more detailed map. Its Mexico advice was last updated on October 20, 2026.