La Purificadora

Mexican boutique hotel  La Purificadora, I’ve decided, is the architectural equivalent of a shot of tequila: momentarily overwhelming, but ultimately makes your weekend go with a bang. Our journey there is equally heady – we get lost within 50 metres of the car-rental office, go past our turn-off for Puebla, cut across five lanes of traffic at a set of lights and have a mini-domestic. I start to question whether Mr Smith and I are really ready to combine romance and adventure to this extent.

We eventually find the hotel. Built as a water-bottling factory in the 1880s, La Purificadora still exudes a distinctly 19th-century solidity – its exterior is all exposed brickwork and columns. But once we pass through reception, the hotel opens out into a vast cathedral of space, in the midst of which a black volcanic-stone staircase leads to the first floor. A hole in the side of the hotel frames a church. Water trickles down the staircase and collects in a pool, and two huge fire pits surrounded by ecclesiastical-purple cubist-style sofas dominate a lobby with rough granite walls and monolithic reclaimed-wood pillars. It’s a mighty clash between past and present.

When we step out of the lift on the third floor, I jump right back in again. Through a glass floor, I can see all the way down to the uneven stone cobbles of the lobby below. Inside our room, it’s all sexy dark wood floors and raw-stone walls, and there’s a vast inviting bed, a glass wardrobe and an onyx-walled shower big enough for two. We open the huge glass door to the balcony and I instinctively reach for Mr Smith like a damsel in distress: the balcony juts out from the side of the building with no visible support. Mr Smith, knowing I’m scared of heights, is clearly hoping my fear will prove to be an aphrodisiac.

When I finally pluck up the courage for further exploration, we decide to start at La Purificadora's rooftop bar. But, in January, it’s just too cold to hang around for long, no matter how warming the spirits on offer. We dip our fingers in the stunning glass-walled swimming pool, admire the glowing onyx pillars and head downstairs, rubbing our hands together.

Despite its smart monochrome decor, the hotel restaurant still feels informal and intimate. I start with squash blossoms stuffed with cheese in a tomato broth, while Mr Smith, ever the risk-taker, opts for thin slices of beef tongue with cactus and lime mayonnaise. We follow this up with regional speciality mole poblano and red snapper cooked in corn leaves. Like the building, the food is a rich mixture of old and new, a modern take on some of Mexico’s most classic dishes. Several glasses of local cabernet sauvignon later and we cannot eat another morsel. The guava crème brûlée will just have to wait. We spend the rest of our evening by the fire in the dramatic lobby, watching the city’s spires shimmer against the dark night sky.

The remainder of our weekend is divided between our divine bed, braving the cold to swim in the exhibitionist rooftop pool – you’re certainly aware of how much food you’re eating when you know that everyone on the terrace can see how you look underwater – and exploring Puebla. The old, colonial centre of town is beautiful. There are aspects of life here that seem to have changed little with the passing of time; the shoe-shiners and their businessmen clients, the row of shops selling candyfloss-like communion dresses, the stores crammed with religious icons.

Walking through the pretty artists’ quarter, I stop to have my fortune read by an old man with a cageful of sparrows. I politely ignore the birdseed he places on the fortune cards to entice little Lupita to divine what lies in store for me – even though this seems to have little effect. Finally, he coaxes the tiny bird to pick one out with her beak. I secrete it away for later. After lunch at a low-key restaurant, we admire the beautiful pre-hispanic art at the Amparo museum and peek into baroque churches. Dusk sees us join strolling families in the tree-filled central square, dodging the sellers holding hundreds of brightly coloured balloons in various animal shapes and watching this little, glittering corner of the world go by.

We wind up our weekend and regretfully say goodbye to the wonderful staff and glorious designer bedroom. I never did get used to the glass floors, but they did make the trip down to breakfast feel almost expeditionary. On the way home, feeling brave, we decide to skip the direct highway back from Puebla to Mexico City and take the winding Paso de Cortes, driving up, along a dirt road, until we pass between two skyline-dominating volcanoes. As we stop to admire the smouldering, snowcapped peak of Popocatapetl, said in local lore to be a warrior holding a burning torch for his lost love, I remember the fortune in my pocket. It tells me that a new sense of romance and adventure will soon enter my life. La Purificadora, whose architecture left me breathless, whose food fired up my tastebuds and whose city was so full of surprises, has given me more than enough of both. My fortune teller, it seems, was uncannily accurate. His little sparrows just don’t see very far into the future.