Chilpancingo

Chilpancingo de los Bravo, usually just Chilpancingo, is the capital of Guerrero and its second-largest city, set in a valley of the Sierra Madre del Sur on the Huacapa River, on the old highway between Mexico City and Acapulco. The name comes from the Nahuatl Chilpantzinco, usually translated as 'place of wasps'. The Spanish town was founded in 1591, and the city grew around four traditional barrios, San Mateo, San Francisco, San Antonio and Santa Cruz, now joined by Tequicorral. The municipality had 283,354 people in 2020, and the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, founded here in 1869, still shapes daily life.

The city's great moment came in 1813, when José María Morelos installed the Congress of Anáhuac, the first independent congress, in the parish church of Santa María de la Asunción, now the cathedral; there he presented the Sentimientos de la Nación, the founding document of Mexican independence. The neoclassical cathedral, from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has a wooden door carved with Morelos, Nicolás Bravo and Vicente Guerrero. It faces the main square, the Plaza Cívica Primer Congreso de Anáhuac, alongside the former Palacio de Gobierno of 1902, home since 1987 of the Museo Regional de Guerrero, and the Palacio de la Cultura with its galleries. Nearby is the Alameda Francisco Granados Maldonado, a park on land donated by the insurgent Nicolás Bravo in 1850. On Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evenings the state band plays in the square.

Chilpancingo is best known in Mexico for its December fair, the Feria de San Mateo, Navidad y Año Nuevo, first held in 1825 and often called the oldest fair of independent Mexico. It opens on the Sunday before Christmas with the Paseo del Pendón, a parade of masked dance groups from all over the state that sets out from the barrio of San Mateo, led by a donkey carrying mezcal and a rider bearing the fair's banner; it ends with the Porrazo de Tigres, a wrestling match between men from each barrio in the bullring, and the fair runs until 6 January. The local dish is pozole, white or green rather than red, eaten on Thursdays with chiles capones (jalapeños stuffed with cheese and cream), tostadas and mezcal.