Tecpatán

Tecpatán sits in north-western Chiapas at about 320 m, on the Totopac River, which joins the Malpaso reservoir a little downstream. It is the seat of the municipality of the same name and has roughly 4,500 people (4,530 at the 2020 census). The name is Nahuatl and is usually read as "place of flints", but the town is Zoque: before the conquest it is said to have been called Ocahual, to have been among the last Zoque towns to hold out against outside invaders, and to have fallen to the Aztec general Tiltototl under Ahuízotl.

Under the Spanish it became one of the main evangelising centres in Chiapas: in 1564 the Dominican Antonio de Pamplona founded the convent next to the church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán. Its ruins, built of red brick and limestone, with huge buttresses, a fallen barrel vault and an open chapel, are still what most people come for. A fire on 3 December 1764 burned 490 houses and two chapels; the road to San Cristóbal reached the town in 1883; the convent began to be abandoned in 1884; and in 1968 the Malpaso dam flooded about half of the municipal territory.

Food is a good reason to linger: pimbu (chipilín greens with masa balls), tzata (black-bean broth with green plantain), shuti snail broth, tamales of chipilín, hierba santa or jaco, and cacao pozol or tascalate to drink. The big feasts are San Marcos Evangelista, Santo Domingo de Guzmán and the Virgen de Guadalupe. In the municipality there is also a hot-spring spa called El Azufre and a monumental Olmec head on the La Victoria estate.