Comala

History

The name comes from Nahuatl and means "place of comales", the clay griddles once made by local potters. The valley was settled long before the Spanish, and nearby Suchitlán and Zacualpan still have Indigenous roots. In the centuries before the Conquest the Purépecha were the dominant power in the region.

In 1527 the area became an encomienda under Bartolomé López, and Franciscans carried out the evangelization. For some three hundred years Comala was counted as a settlement, a ranch or a village, and into the early 1800s it was governed as a Republic of Indians with its own governor. It became a municipality in 1820, with Cayetano Pizarro as first mayor, and again under the 1857 constitution.

In 1883 a German businessman, Arnold Vogel, planted the first coffee estate in the municipality, which pushed local farming and industry forward. The state's first power plant opened at El Remate in 1906 and lit Comala, Colima and Villa de Álvarez. In 1961 the town decided to paint itself white to stand apart from its neighbors. Its center was declared a Historic Monument Zone in 1988, and in 2002 Comala became one of the first Pueblos Mágicos. The restaurants under the portales, a tradition more than fifty years old, remain its main draw.