Atitalaquia

The name is Nahuatl: atl, water, and talaquia, to enter; "the place where water goes in", a sinkhole. Atitalaquia lies in the Mezquital Valley at 2,085 metres, with a semi-dry temperate climate that averages 16.5 °C and about 947 millimetres of rain a year. Today it is almost one urban fabric with Tula de Allende: it belongs to the Tula metropolitan area, and the barrios of El Dendhó and El Tablón were absorbed into the built-up area in the 1990 census. In 2020 it had 6,924 inhabitants, 21.96% of the municipality.

Written history starts before the Spaniards. Otomí, Chichimec, Tepanec and Nahua-Toltec peoples passed through; Tula subdued it around the year 1000 and the Mexica made it a tributary around 1450. Wikipedia also records that, according to the Tira de la Peregrinación (Codex Boturini), the migrating Mexica settled here for ten years from 1164. By 1530 it was in Spanish hands, in 1540 it became part of Tetepango, and in 1869 it was made a municipal seat.

What moves people most today is faith. Every Good Friday there is a Passion walk with centurions clearing a path through the crowd for the Christ carrying his cross, as photos in the Wikimedia Commons archive show. Since 1915 the image of the Virgin of Tears, kept at the sanctuary in Tetepango, has toured Atitalaquia's communities to ask for rain on the cornfields; in July 2025 Criterio Hidalgo reported that more than 30,000 people walked just over 13 km from the church of San Miguel Arcángel to the sanctuary, on the centenary of that procession.