General Cepeda

History

Nomadic groups left thousands of rock carvings in the nearby Narihua hills, some estimated at six thousand years old. The Spanish reached the spot in 1568, when Francisco Cano explored the region and found a small lake, today called Laguna de Patos.

The land became part of the Marquisate of San Miguel de Aguayo, among the largest landholdings in the Americas, begun by Francisco de Urdiñola. It was run from the hacienda of San Francisco de los Patos, which stood where the town is now. After independence the estate passed to the Sánchez Navarro family. Because the family openly backed the French intervention and Maximilian's empire, President Benito Juárez expropriated the property and on July 15, 1865, made the hacienda the Villa de Patos. That date is treated as the town's beginning, and the hacienda headquarters became the town hall.

On December 29, 1892, the state congress renamed it for General Victoriano Cepeda, a governor of Coahuila who fought against the French. Since the 1990s, fossil finds at Rincón Colorado, including the dinosaurs Velafrons coahuilensis and Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna, have brought scientists to the area; the site was the first in Mexico to be protected as a paleontological zone. The town became a Pueblo Mágico in 2023.