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I used to find skeletons unsettling. Death was something I kept at arm’s length — heavy, dark, better not looked at directly. Then I spent Día de los Muertos walking the streets of Puerto Vallarta, standing before altar after altar on the Malecón and the Isla Río Cuale, watching a parade of elegant skeletal figures move through the evening light — and something in me shifted for good.
What I understood that night is this: who honors the dead also celebrates life. Being reminded that life ends is not a reason to shrink. It is an invitation to embrace everything, fully, as it comes. No wonder Mexicans turn everything into a fiesta. They have understood something profound that the rest of us are still learning. I felt it on a deep level walking those streets, and for the first time in a long time, I felt I had found my place in the world.
The streets, the altars, and the tallest Catrina in the world
The city transforms in the days leading up to November 1st. Walking the Malecón and the Isla Río Cuale, you move through a world of ofrendas — altars stacked with cempasúchil marigolds, candles, photographs, food, and the personal objects of people who are gone but not forgotten. Each one is an act of love made visible. The altars on the Isla Río Cuale are particularly moving — set among the trees and the sound of the river, they carry a quiet intimacy that stops you mid-step.
The parade winds through the streets with music and faces painted in the Catrina style — flowers traced around the eyes, bones along the jaw, an elegance that is neither frightening nor morbid. It is, somehow, joyful.
Presiding over it all on the esplanade of the Malecón lighthouse is Puerto Vallarta’s monumental Catrina — a Guinness World Record holder for the tallest in the world, standing at over 28 meters. She is created each year by local artists, dressed in a new gown for each festival, and she is extraordinary: skeletal, feminine, magnificent. She was originally conceived by young local artist Alondra Muca, and crafted by a team of architects, seamstresses, painters, and florists over months of work. For the last two years, she has not stood alone. Beside her appeared a Xoloitzcuintle — a hairless Mexican dog known as Tito Vallar — and his presence is not decorative. It is deeply intentional.
The sacred dog that walks beside the dead
The Xoloitzcuintle — the Xolo — is one of Mexico’s most ancient breeds, and one of the most spiritually significant animals in all of Mesoamerican culture. The name comes from Nahuatl: Xolotl, the Aztec god who accompanied the dead, and itzcuintli, meaning dog. For the Aztec and Maya, the Xolo was not a pet. It was a sacred guide — a companion who walked with human souls through the nine levels of the underworld on their journey to eternal rest.
Archaeologists have found human skeletons buried alongside Xolo remains, confirming how literally this belief was held. A person should not make that crossing alone. During Día de los Muertos, it is still traditional to include a Xolo figure on the ofrenda to guide the returning soul home. There is even a dedicated day that honours dogs specifically — a recognition that these animals are guardians not only in life but on the journey beyond it. To see the monumental Catrina standing beside her Xolo on the Malecón is to see an ancient belief rendered at a scale that matches its meaning.
Painting my friends — and giving old fears a new life
I have always been an artist. I am used to painting things into reality — to taking what exists only in imagination and making it visible, tangible, present. But painting my friends in the Catrina style was something different. It felt like taking the fears I had long carried about death and skeletons — those dark, uneasy feelings I had spent years avoiding — and giving them new life. A joyful one.
This year I painted two friends: Fernando, a Mexican from Mexico City, and Fiona, an expat from England. As I worked, something shifted in each of them. Each brushstroke added intention. By the time they were finished, they were not just wearing makeup. They were walking paintings — magically dynamic, genuinely awe-inspiring. Fernando moved through the streets as someone who has always belonged to this tradition, because he has. Fiona, an outsider like me, stepped into it with the kind of open-hearted courage that makes you love expat life in Puerto Vallarta. Both became something beyond themselves. And watching it happen, I understood something I hadn’t expected: that giving form to what we fear is how we begin to release it.
If you are in Puerto Vallarta at the end of October, stay through November 2nd. Walk the Malecón. Stand before the altars on the Isla Río Cuale. Look up at the monumental Catrina and the dog beside her. Let the tradition do what it has done for three thousand years — remind you that you are alive, and that this is worth celebrating.
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