In This Mexican Town, One in 5 People Is a Glassmaker

Author: Mark Oprea / Source: Atlas Obscura

In October every year, a 213-foot synthetic Christmas tree is raised in the small pueblo of Chignahuapan, Puebla, about three hours east of Mexico City. The tree, adorned with lights and esferas—what all of the nearby shops call ornaments—is so grand that the tip-top of it disappears into the blanket of fog hovering over the town.

While the fog is what gives Chignahuapan the nickname “Pequeño Londres,” or “Little London,” the town is well-known throughout Mexico for its powerhouse production of esferas, and for the skilled families of sopladores de vidrios, the glassmakers who make them. A sign hanging proudly near the town’s open-air bus terminal declares Chignahuapan as “EL MUNDO DE LA ESFERA.” This claim is borne out by the numbers: More than 400 artisans and workshops have taken up shop around the pueblo in the last 45 years, and that number, along with the volume of visiting tourists, is growing. Together, these craftspeople make a collective 70 million glass items per year.

“Every business has their own workshop,” Fernando Muñoz says in Spanish, as he pulls into a car-packed driveway on the outskirts of the city. Nearby, cows graze freely in backyards, and hens run through rain puddles in clay-colored roads. “Every single one of us has our own style.” He walks past a wall of canaries for sale, pushes aside two big blankets, and the factory of Casa Muñoz appears: a miniature warehouse with hundreds of glass bulbs at different stages of production lying around.

There’s an AutoCAD machine, too. Muñoz has a storefront downtown, but the factory is all but hidden to the public.

Started by Juan Manuel Muñoz, Fernando’s father, in the mid-1990s, Casa Muñoz is a typical representation of the glass factories in Chignahuapan, which generally operate 365 days per year in mostly the same manner. For one, all of the employees are family—Juan’s wife Christina Reyes is the production manager and his sister Carmen runs the storefront. “All my sons know how to do this,” Juan says in Spanish, as he runs a long glass tube over a blowtorch fixed to a long, assembly-line table.

Above him on a drying table sit chocolate-hued globes drying…

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