Sabanilla

Sabanilla is the seat of a municipality of 29,889 people in the Northern Mountains of Chiapas, already in hot country (warm, humid, with rain nearly all year). The town had 3,360 residents in 2020, and a little over half identify as indigenous (59.55 percent); Sabanilla Ch'ol is counted as one of the variants of that language. As the story goes, around 1600 the Dominican friar Lorenzo de la Nada gathered the population here, and a drought around 1700 pushed people from Moyos, Tumbalá, Yajalón, Tila and Petalcingo to look for wetter land. The present town was founded in 1773 by about 150 people from Moyos fleeing famine; the licence for their chapel is dated 23 April 1773.\n\nThe town splits into two zones with Ch'ol names, Yok-lum, “foot of the town”, and Jo-lum, “head of the town”, and has 13 barrios; four of them (Santa Rosa, Centro, Jo-lum and Juan Esponda) sit by the river and are flood-risk areas. The Sabanilla, Nava, Agua Blanca, Jubatiún, Morelia and Mazatán rivers cross the municipality. After the seat, the biggest localities are Los Naranjos (2,830), Moyos (2,100) and El Calvario (1,821). It borders Tila, Huitiupán, Simojovel and, to the north, Tabasco.\n\nThis is not a destination with organised attractions; you come to see a warm-country Ch'ol seat, its square and its river. I found no dated fiestas or market day in reliable sources.