Ojo de Agua

Ojo de Agua is a neighbourhood of cobbled lanes on the rise south of downtown Saltillo, a little over a kilometre from the Plaza de Armas. It takes its name from the spring that wells up beneath its church and that, by tradition, drew the settlers who founded the villa of Santiago del Saltillo in 1577; historians add that the town was not actually laid out here, because the slope made building hard, but that it owes its existence to the spring. In June 2024, at the Tianguis Internacional de Pueblos Mágicos in San Antonio, Texas, Mexico's Tourism Secretariat named it a Barrio Mágico, the first in Coahuila, and in August the city celebrated the unveiling of the plaque.

The neighbourhood itself came later. By around 1840 there were houses by the spring, which until the 18th century formed a pool about 80 cm deep with a drop of a metre and a half, and by 1870 a small chapel known as La Alcantarilla collected its water. On 3 March 1873 the first plots were handed out to families, several of Tlaxcalan descent, who kept looms for sarapes and blankets. The present church of the Santísimo Cristo del Ojo de Agua, in neo-Romanesque style, went up at the turn of the 20th century directly over the spring; its Christ was bought in Italy by two sisters, and the cross on the tower reads "Ayer, hoy y siempre" (yesterday, today and always).

The neighbourhood is also bound up with Saltillo's matachín dancers. The Danza del Ojo de Agua has been danced at the feast of the Santo Cristo since 1840, and it nearly died out in the 1970s and 1980s until locals such as Francisco Gámez, known as "Pancho La Gallina", revived it. The patronal feast peaks on September 8, after a novena with 5 am masses and a candle procession, and every July, for the city's anniversary, the Matlachinada sets out from this parish with more than 900 dancers bound for the cathedral. Local legends, like the Tlaxcalan ghost said to appear by the La Tórtola creek in the small hours of the feast, are still told in these streets.