San Gregorio Cuautzingo

San Gregorio Cuautzingo lies about 4 km east of the centre of Chalco de Díaz Covarrubias, at 2,254 m above sea level. INEGI counted 8,485 people here in 2020, a number that stands out against the 13,138 of 2010: over those ten years the inhabited homes fell from roughly 5,460 to roughly 2,130, and the sources I checked do not explain why. Right beside it, to the east and south, the housing estates of Los Álamos and Los Héroes Chalco have grown up with tens of thousands of residents, so the old village now sits in a ring of new development.

The name is Nahuatl and can be read two ways: "place of the eaglets" or "place of the venerable eagles" (cuauhtli, eagle; tzin, a respectful ending; co, place). San Gregorio is the patron saint, Gregory the Great. Its administrative past is unusual for a village this size: on 16 April 1875 it was made an independent municipality, split from Chalco, but the arrangement lasted under twenty years. On 7 September 1894 the municipality was abolished and the land went back to Chalco.

What there is to see is modest: a stone parish church with a bell tower and clock facing a cobbled plaza, and a park with a bandstand, both photographed and drawn by local residents in a Wikimedia Commons documentation project. The climate is temperate highland: about 16 °C on average, January the coolest month, rain on about 250 days a year (July is the wettest) and the occasional winter frost.