Ixmiquilpan

Ixmiquilpan is the main town of the Mezquital Valley, a riverside town of about 37,000 people on the Tula River and the cultural heart of the Hñähñu, the Otomí people who settled this dry valley before the Toltecs arrived. Their name for it, Ntsʼu̱tkʼani, means place of purslane; the Nahuatl name Itzmiquilpan was later added on top. Almost a third of the municipality still speaks Otomí, and the town is the market centre for dozens of surrounding villages, known for lamb barbacoa and dishes made with local plants and insects, from maguey flowers (gualumbos) to escamoles.

Augustinian friars founded the town with the church and convent of San Miguel Arcángel in 1550, a fortress-style church with a Plateresque facade. Its fame lies inside: along the nave runs a long frieze of polychrome murals painted by indigenous artists, in which eagle, jaguar and coyote warriors in feathered helmets fight with obsidian-edged swords, drag prisoners and battle fantastic creatures such as a centaur crowned with quetzal feathers, all among European-style foliage. They were hidden for centuries until a mid-20th-century renovation uncovered them, and historians link them to the Chichimeca War (1540 to 1590), when Otomí fighters defended the frontier. Monastic murals of the time were usually monochrome and biblical, which makes these exceptional.

The rest of the centre is easy to walk. The Plaza Juárez fountain holds the original Diana the Huntress statue cast for Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma in 1942, removed for being too nude and installed here in 1970. The pink-stone Capilla del Carmen (1752 to 1772) has tall gilded altarpieces, and the 1655 stone bridge of San Miguel crosses the river to the old barrio of La Otra Banda. Around town, volcanically heated springs feed a string of balnearios and water parks such as El Tephé, Te-Pathé, Dios Padre and EcoAlberto, which make Ixmiquilpan the weekend playground of Hidalgo, and the town is the usual base for the Grutas de Tolantongo.