Tlapa de Comonfort

Tlapa de Comonfort, usually just Tlapa, is the main city of La Montaña, the mountainous east of Guerrero, about 342 km from Mexico City at around 1,100 m above sea level, on the banks of the Tlapaneco River, a tributary of the Balsas. It had 59,580 people in 2020, the fifth-largest city in the state, and it is the commercial, educational and service centre for a region where most of Guerrero's Indigenous people, Nahuas, Mixtecs and Tlapanecs, live; colectivos leave from here for every corner of La Montaña. The name comes from Nahuatl and is variously read as 'place where they wash' or 'place of dyers'; in Mixtec the city is called Tindaꞌi. Surrounded by hills, it calls itself the Corazón de la Montaña.

Before the Spanish, this was the heart of the kingdom of Tlachinollan, ruled by Mixtecs and Tlapanec-Nahuas from at least 1300 and recorded in the Codex Azoyú. The Aztecs conquered it in a campaign of 1486 and made Tlapan the capital of a tributary province that paid them gold, cotton clothing, warrior costumes and gourds for cacao. Augustinian friars founded the convent in the 16th century; its church of San Agustín is now the cathedral. Tlapa belonged to Puebla until it joined the new state of Guerrero in 1849, and it took the name 'de Comonfort' in honour of Ignacio Comonfort, the liberal general and later president, who carried out improvements here as military commander and prefect.

The great event of the year is the fiesta of the Señor del Nicho, a crucified Christ said to have been found in a tunnel of the cathedral. Through October, groups of bakers, taxi drivers, musicians, teachers and other trades make their pilgrimages, and on 23 October the image is carried on shoulders for more than four hours through streets covered with sawdust carpets, while dancers perform the Tlacololeros, the Doce Pares de Francia and the Tres Potencias. Around the city are fruit orchards along the Tlapaneco, the Axoxuca waterfall, the Chiepetlán archaeological zone, the old ahuehuete trees of Acatenco, and the Cerro de la Cruz, climbed for its view of the city at sunrise or sunset; a community museum shows archaeological pieces and local history.