Tula de Allende

Tula de Allende, usually just called Tula, is a town of about 29,000 people (2020) in the southwest of Hidalgo, built on the southern edge of the ancient Toltec capital whose ruins rise just to the north. Its name comes from the Nahuatl Tollan, the place of reeds; its Otomi name is Mämeni, and "de Allende" honours Ignacio Allende, hero of the War of Independence. It was a quiet farming town until the mid-20th century, when cement works, a PEMEX refinery opened in 1976 and a thermoelectric plant turned it into one of the region's industrial hubs; the west of the municipality has stayed rural.

The historic centre gathers around the Cathedral of San José, built by Franciscan friars in the mid-16th century as the church of one of the earliest convents in Mexico. It looks more like a fortress than a church: a single nave with massive walls braced by fourteen buttresses and topped by ninety merlons, a crenellated atrium wall entered through a 17th-century trefoil arch, and a stone cross in the middle of the atrium. Inside, the Gothic ribbed vaults are bare after a 20th-century remodelling, and the main altar holds a modern triptych of the Risen Christ in which the feathered serpent and Otomi figures appear. The two-storey cloister keeps fresco paintings. The church became a cathedral in 1961, when Pope John XXIII created the diocese of Tula.

Next to the cathedral are the main garden, an open-air theatre framed by the mural Tula Eterna by Juan Pablo Patiño Cornejo, and the free Sala Histórica Quetzalcóatl, with archaeological pieces upstairs. The pedestrian Andador Quetzalcóatl leads north to a footbridge over the Tula River and on toward the ruins. Tula is also a place to eat Hidalgo's regional food, from lamb barbacoa and mixiotes to escamoles and maguey worms in season.