Huejotzingo

History

The name comes from the Nahuatl Huexotzinco, "place of small willows." The slopes of Iztaccíhuatl were settled by Olmeca-Xicalanca groups and later by Toltecs and Chichimecs, and the scattered villages grew into a powerful lordship whose patron deity was Camaxtli. It reached its height between the 13th and 14th centuries, fighting and allying by turns with Tlaxcala and the cities of the Valley of Mexico. The old town stood on high ground among ravines that worked as natural defenses. The Mexica came to dominate it in the 15th century, but relations were poor, and in 1520 Huejotzingo sided with the Spanish.

Because of that alliance, the Franciscans chose it for one of their first monasteries in New Spain in the mid-1520s. Around 1529 fray Juan de Alameda moved the population, greatly reduced by war and epidemics, down to the plain and resettled it in four neighborhoods around the monastery. The present complex, the third on the site, was built under his direction and finished in 1570. It served as church, school and hospital, and its open chapel and corner chapels became a model for other mission complexes.

In the colonial period the town received a coat of arms from the Spanish crown and developed a textile industry. In 1994 the monastery was listed by UNESCO among the early monasteries on the slopes of Popocatépetl. Huejotzingo was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2023.