San Rafael

San Rafael fills a wooded valley at about 2,550 m on the slopes of Iztaccíhuatl. It belongs to the municipality of Tlalmanalco, yet it is the municipality's largest community, with 22,357 people in the 2020 census, more than the municipal seat itself. Its story is the story of a factory. An ironworks came first; then in the 1890s two Spaniards, Andrés Ahedo and José Sánchez Ramos, set up a paper mill that used the forest timber and the water running off the volcano, and on 1 March 1894 the Compañía de las Fábricas de Papel de San Rafael y Anexas was incorporated with a capital of one million pesos. A concession from Porfirio Díaz's government gave it the logging rights on the slopes of Iztaccíhuatl for a hundred years.

The company took over other mills in the area, employed up to about 2,000 people and was for decades the economic engine of the region, its reach extending to Chalco and Amecameca. It made banknote paper and the first Mexico City Metro tickets. During the Revolution the mill stood idle from 1914 to 1916, and its properties suffered as Zapatista forces passed through. In 1994, when the concession ran out, the company declared bankruptcy and laid off its workforce, which had enjoyed one of the most generous union contracts in Mexico; the forests passed to the local ejido farmers.

What strikes you on arrival is the town the factory built. Rows of workers' housing, known as "los cuartos", came first; a year later the company added the Casino Cosmopolita for its engineers, chemists and senior staff, with dining rooms, games rooms, a library and billiard tables, a red-and-white brick building that now looks run-down. There are chalet-style houses, an old company store with 22 shop units whose upper floor was a cinema in the 1930s, and a lighthouse-like tower on the plaza that you can climb. A few kilometres away, the Parque Ecoturístico Dos Aguas, where the La Tranca and Agua de la Ardilla rivers meet, has trails, zip lines and camping, and is the best way in to the Cascada de Los Diamantes, a waterfall of about 110 m fed by snowmelt from the volcano.