Los Reyes Acozac

Los Reyes Acozac is one of the twelve pueblos of Tecámac municipality, in the north of the Valley of Mexico at 2,250 m. The 2020 census counted 21,565 people. It sits at about kilometre 44 of the Mexico–Pachuca highway, a little under a kilometre to the west, and is ringed by the land of neighbouring San Lucas Xolox. The name comes from Nahuatl acozaque, "yellow water": the village stood on the shore of Lake Texcoco, and the tepetate clay in the soil tinted the water. Mammoth bones have turned up in the area.

What brings visitors is the festival calendar. The patron feast is 6 January, Epiphany, with fireworks castles and "toros": a man wears a frame of cane and papier-mâché shaped like a bull and runs through the plaza after the crowd. Between 25 December and 5 January the images of the Three Kings are carried in procession to San Lucas Xolox and brought back with the Christ Child, with dancers, brass bands and santiagueros, who act out the battles of Moors and Christians and now belong to six groups.

The other date is the Feria del Cocol on Easter Sunday. It began in the 1960s at the railway station and since 1978 has been held in daylight on the main plaza. Shopkeepers climb onto their rooftops and throw bags of cocoles, the diamond-shaped bread sweetened with honey and cinnamon, sometimes with aniseed or a cheese filling. Judas effigies are burned, a greased pole is climbed and there is dancing. Smaller feasts fall on 3 May (El Calvario neighbourhood), 8 September, 11 November (San Martín Caballero, La Palma) and 12 December (Guadalupe neighbourhood).