Tulancingo

Tulancingo, officially Tulancingo de Bravo, is Hidalgo's second-largest city, with about 106,000 people in 2020, set in the broad Tulancingo valley about 40 km east of Pachuca. Its name comes from Nahuatl words for the reeds that grew here, and "de Bravo" was added in 1858 for Nicolás Bravo, the independence hero who took the city in 1821 and stayed on for a while. The valley was a trading crossroads for Otomí, Tepehua and Totonac peoples long before the Spanish took it in 1525; Franciscan friars arrived in 1527, and colonists liked its fertile land so much that it was nicknamed the retreat of old conquistadors. Today it is a working city best known for its wool textiles, from yarn and blankets to sarapes, and for its food.

The centre is the Jardín La Floresta, once the atrium of the first Franciscan convent, facing the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista. Founded with the convent in 1528, it was rebuilt from 1788 by the architect José Damián Ortiz de Castro in sober neoclassical style, in grey stone with a portico framed by two 17-metre Ionic columns, and it still has a working pipe organ; it became a cathedral in 1862 and the seat of an archdiocese in 2007. A block from the San Miguel cemetery stands the small Capilla de la Expiración, built in 1527 and considered the oldest chapel in the region, and the Casa de los Emperadores lodged both Agustín de Iturbide in 1823 and Maximilian in 1865.

Tulancingo is the hometown of Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, El Santo, the masked lucha libre legend born here in 1917: there is a 2.3-metre statue of him on the boulevard that bears his name and a Museo del Santo with more than 200 of his masks, suits, comics and film posters. The old railway station of 1893 houses the railway museum, with train cars turned into a café, and the earlier station holds the Museo de Datos Históricos. Locals swear by guajolotes, a bread roll stuffed with beans, fried enchiladas and egg or chicken, and tulancingueñas, tortillas with ham and cheese in green salsa. A few minutes from the centre lies the archaeological site of Huapalcalco, with a small pyramid and ancient rock paintings in the cliffs.