Jiliapan

Jiliapan is the largest community in Pacula municipality: 1,008 people in 2020, 21% of the total. It sits at 1,460 metres at the edge of the Sierra Gorda, in a narrow valley open to the northeast. The village still has the smelting ovens where metal brought from the local old mine was worked; INEGI's map even shows a hill by that name, Mina Vieja, and on the same sheet Cerro Grande and Cruz Grande, both above 2,200 metres.

In 1958 and 1960 the anthropologist Leonardo Manrique Castañeda spent periods in Jiliapan and described a farming village of about 600 people: mostly maize, plus arvejón peas, beans, squash, chile and barley, on limestone soils with three or four low-flow springs that were not enough to irrigate except at La Vega. Oaks, conifers and arbutus grew around it, and ash, poplar and huizache in the valley itself. He recorded three groups living in different zones: mestizos in El Centro, El Barrio and La Vega, Pames (locally called 'chichimecos') in El Bordo, and Otomi in Las Lomas. It is a portrait from more than six decades ago.

The municipal seat, Pacula, lies about 9 km to the northeast in a straight line and holds the church of San Juan Bautista and a statue of Miguel Hidalgo beside the bandstand. Part of the municipality belongs to Los Mármoles National Park, decreed in 1936, and rain falls mostly from May to September; Jiliapan's climate is temperate subhumid.