Nopaltepec

Nopaltepec, "on the hill of the nopal cactus", is the seat of a small, flat municipality at the northeastern tip of the State of Mexico, right against Hidalgo. The town had 3,941 residents in 2020 and sits at about 2,450 m. There are no rivers or lakes; water comes from wells, and the land is covered in prickly pear, maguey, pepper trees and mesquite. People live from growing cactus fruit, making pulque and running small sewing workshops.

Mounds and figurines turned up in the fields point to Teotihuacan-era settlement. Chichimec groups arrived around 1134, and the Annals of Cuautitlán say their leader Xólotl had boundary markers placed at Nopaltepec, Teotitlán and Atepoxco; the area later belonged to the Acolhua kingdom. A 1603 list of the towns under the Otumba district names it Santa María de Nopaltepeque, a name it kept as Santa María de la Asunción Nopaltepec when it became a municipality in 1871. In 1816, during the War of Independence, Pedro Osorno's guerrillas from the plains of Apan stopped José Barradas's royalist troops at a pass they called the throat of Nopaltepec, tying lassos between their saddles and charging in line to bowl the enemy over.

The main building in town is the parish church of Santa María de la Asunción, with old altarpieces and a decorated interior; the parish was founded in 1901 and enlarged in 1932. Its feast runs from 14 to 17 August, and before dawn on the 15th the procession walks over carpets of dyed sawdust. The municipality's best-known sight is about 9 km from town: the great arcade of the Padre Tembleque aqueduct, a 16th-century work that carried water to Otumba and was added to UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2015. Local cooking runs to mixiotes, mutton barbacoa, escamoles, chinicuil maguey worms and dishes of nopal and maguey flowers.