San Mateo Mexicaltzingo

San Mateo Mexicaltzingo is the seat of the municipality of Mexicaltzingo in the Toluca valley, tucked against Metepec and Calimaya and about 12 km in a straight line from central Toluca. It stands at 2,600 m, and INEGI's 2020 census counted 10,854 people in the town and 13,807 in the whole municipality, which covers just 12.2 km2. The whole municipality fits in that small territory: the town and the fields around it.

The Nahuatl name is usually rendered as "place where the honourable Mexica live". The accepted account dates the settlement to about 1475, when Axayacatl ordered families from a village near Iztapalapa moved to this area south of today's Toluca. After the Conquest the Spanish largely destroyed it, including its place of worship, and around 1527 it was renamed San Mateo Mexicaltzingo. Some residents returned by about 1560 and set up a town under its own tlatoani. The first temple to Saint Matthew the Apostle went up in 1603 and the present church dates from 1776. The municipality was created in 1869, after a petition first filed in 1849, and the town hall was only built in 1921.

What you visit here is modest and runs at village pace: the parish church of San Mateo and its atrium, the plaza, and the Casa de Cultura, which houses a small museum on the Toluca–Tenango del Valle railway. Around the town are maize fields, plum, peach and apple orchards, barley, carrot and pea plots, and dairy sheds. Mexicaltzingo is best known for its chicharrón, sent to neighbouring municipalities, Toluca and Mexico City, so it is a fair place to try it. The archaeological sites of La Loma, Las Palmas, Tecacaxtitla and Bohuantilta in the municipality are unexplored and not open to visitors.