Jaltepec

Jaltepec comes from Nahuatl xalli, sand, and tepec, hill or town: "place of sandy ground" or "on the sandy hill". It lies in the Tulancingo Valley at 2,157 metres, on plain and valley terrain with a semi-dry temperate climate, and its waters drain to the Metztitlán river subbasin. Today it is an urban locality counted inside the Tulancingo metropolitan area, and INEGI classes it as a villa.

The clearest thing the numbers say is how fast it has grown. The 2000 census counted 3,266 inhabitants; in 2005 there were 5,177, in 2010 6,463 and in 2020 7,973, which is 4.74% of the population of the municipality of Tulancingo de Bravo. There are 2,315 occupied private homes. More than a quarter of the people are 14 or younger (2,061), only 503 are 65 or older, and 6,614 say they are Catholic against 577 Protestant.

The building that organises the town is the church of San Francisco de Asís, with a whitewashed front and a tower holding a bell under a small dome, facing a churchyard with a stone cross. Tulancingo is only a few kilometres from Jaltepec, and the two make up a single metropolitan area.