Tlalmanalco de Velázquez

Tlalmanalco de Velázquez is the seat of Tlalmanalco municipality in the southeastern corner of the State of Mexico, where the Chalco valley starts climbing toward Iztaccíhuatl. The volcano fills the view here, and the municipality reaches all the way up to its western ridge. The town had 14,518 people in 2020. Its Nahuatl name is usually translated as "place of flattened land", and the state named it a Pueblo con Encanto in November 2018.

The Nonohualcas founded a city-state here in 1336, one of the Chalca confederation along with Amaquemecan, Chimalhuacán and Tenango Tepopollan, and the Aztecs only brought it under their rule in 1465. The Franciscans arrived in 1525: Friar Juan de Rivas laid out the Spanish town and built its first church, opened in 1532, and Friar Martín de Valencia, leader of the first twelve Franciscans in Mexico, was buried there in 1534.

That convent of San Luis Obispo is still the reason to come. Its open chapel, where Mass was said outdoors for Indigenous congregations, was never finished, but its five arches keep carvings of angels, skulls, monkeys and flowers cut by local stonemasons, a textbook case of what art historians call tequitqui art. Historian Gustavo Curiel reads the hand-holding figures as a kind of dance of death. Inside the church is a Baroque cedar altarpiece with paintings by Baltasar de Echave, and the cloister has murals including portraits of Martín de Valencia and Saint Clare.

The old Bethlemite hospital now houses the town hall and the culture centre, and the town hall also holds the Nonohualca community museum: about 500 local archaeological pieces, mostly Preclassic, plus a mammoth molar and a mural of the god Tezcatlipoca. Some 5 km east is San Rafael, the former paper-mill village on the way to the Iztaccíhuatl waterfalls.

Local cooking leans on roast rabbit, mixiotes, green mole and tamales made with capulín cherries.