Juanacatlán

Juanacatlán is the seat of the municipality of the same name in central Jalisco, on the Santiago River opposite El Salto and inside the Guadalajara metropolitan area. It sits at roughly 1,525 metres above sea level and had 9,626 residents at the 2020 census, out of 30,855 in the whole municipality, whose largest locality is La Aurora. The name comes from Nahuatl xonacatlan; the usual gloss "place of onions" is doubtful because onions arrived with the Spanish, and other readings tie it to the butterflies of Cerro El Papantón.

Before the conquest the area belonged to the chiefdom of Tololotlán, a tributary of the lordship of Tonalá. The Spanish took formal possession on 25 March 1530 and friars began evangelising in 1531. In front of the church stands a 2.5-metre stone cross whose base carries the town's founding date, 1662. It answered to Zapotlanejo until a decree of 19 December 1898 made it a municipality.

Its fame comes from the Salto de Juanacatlán, a drop on the Santiago already recorded in 1556 and nicknamed the "Mexican Niagara". In the late 19th century the country's first hydroelectric plant was installed beside it, and in 1896 work began on a cotton spinning and weaving mill, which gave rise to the industrial colony of Río Grande, today El Salto. The falls are now almost gone and the river, badly polluted by industrial discharges, is a major environmental problem for the area; it is not a place to visit for scenery.

What can be walked is the centre: the plaza and its bandstand, the entrance arches, the stone cross and the church that local tradition calls the Basílica Lateranense, whose construction was finished on 7 July 1680. The May fair, 5 to 15 May, brings a palenque, horse races and the municipal book and culture fair.