Chilapa de Álvarez

Chilapa de Álvarez, usually just Chilapa, is a city of about 34,000 people in the hills of central-eastern Guerrero, around 54 km from Chilpancingo on the road to Tlapa, at about 1,400 m above sea level. The name comes from the Nahuatl Chilapan, read either as 'over the red water' or 'place of chilli fields'; 'de Álvarez' honours General Juan Álvarez. Augustinian friars founded the present town on 5 October 1533, bringing people down from the hill of Chilapantepetl to the valley, and that date is still celebrated as the city's founding. Chilapa was fought over by insurgents and royalists in the War of Independence and was taken by Morelos in 1811.

The city's great draw is its Sunday tianguis, said to have run since the friars' arrival in 1533 and considered the largest and oldest market in Guerrero. From about 6am every Sunday, thousands of traders, many of them Nahua farmers and artisans from Zitlala, José Joaquín de Herrera, Tlapa, Ahuacuotzingo, Olinalá and Chilapa's own villages, set out their goods around the Eucaria Apreza roundabout: hats, bags, mats and figures woven from palm and corn husk, tiger and tlacololero dance masks, painted clay pots and cazuelas, Olinalá lacquer boxes, embroidered blouses and the dresses of Acatlán, wooden furniture, chillies, beans, fruit, turkeys and firewood. Food stalls sell pozole with pig's trotters, green pozole, red mole, tamales and mezcal, and some trading is still done by barter.

The tianguis sets up beside the cathedral, a huge church dedicated to the Assumption. An earlier church was destroyed by fire in 1930, and the architect Federico Mariscal designed the new one, built between 1931 and 1975 in a nationalist style with five naves and a façade carved in pink and green local stone, crowned by St Michael casting out the devil. Chilapa and nearby Atzacoaloya, Acatlán, Zitlala and Atempa also keep the craft of weaving rebozos on colonial pedal looms, though only a few workshops remain. In April the 'Tigrada' processions of jaguar dancers go round the city's barrios.