Ocotlán

Ocotlán is the largest city in Jalisco's Ciénega region and the seat of the municipality of the same name, at the northeast tip of Lake Chapala where the Zula River meets the Santiago, about 1,530 metres up. It had 94,978 people at the 2020 census. The Nahuatl name means "place of the ocotes", the local pines.

Before the conquest it was a chiefdom within the lordship of Coinan, with Zula and Jamay under its rule. Nuño de Guzmán took it on 15 March 1530; Franciscans arrived in 1537 and later the Augustinians founded a friary and named the town Santiago de Ocotlán. An indigenous revolt in 1540 lasted two years, and in 1637 a matlazáhuatl epidemic devastated the population. It became a villa in 1906 and a city in 1963.

The date that defines the town is 2 October 1847, when a strong earthquake destroyed most of it, church included. The next day, at an open-air Mass in front of the ruins, some two thousand people said they saw an image of Christ crucified in the sky for about half an hour. In 1911 the archbishop of Guadalajara recognised the apparition, and since 1912 the Señor de la Misericordia (Lord of Mercy) has been celebrated from 20 September to 3 October: each day a different trade guild redecorates the church, and there are cockfights, bands, dances, charreadas, jaripeos, horse races and a fair with a farm and livestock show.

On the main plaza stands the Señor de la Misericordia church, begun in 1850 and finished in 1913, with an eight-column Doric portico and paintings inside depicting the apparition; beside it is a monument to the Lord of Mercy about twenty metres tall, carved with scenes of the earthquake. Next to them is the chapel of La Purísima, or Nuestra Señora de Ocotlán, built by the Franciscans in the 16th century and rebuilt by the Augustinians in the 17th, with a green and red stone front and a Churrigueresque altarpiece. On the way out toward Jamay, by the lake, is El Fuerte, a building where Álvaro Obregón is said to have spent long stays.

Ocotlán calls itself the city of furniture: mass production began in the 1960s and today hundreds of workshops and factories, many family-run, make furniture the main industry. Nestlé opened its first Mexican plant here in 1935. At the table the lake and birria rule: caldo michi, dried or breaded charales, catfish, fish roe and charred birria, plus guasanas (fresh chickpeas) roasted or boiled and drinking cazuelas. For a stroll there is La Eucalera park, with eucalyptus groves, an open-air auditorium and an artificial lake, and the Parque de los Enamorados on the old Zula River landing.