San Miguel el Alto

San Miguel el Alto is the seat of the municipality of the same name in the Altos Sur region of Jalisco, at 1,851 metres. The 2020 census counted 25,925 people. The town lives off textile workshops, cattle and the pink cantera stone quarried nearby, which is also what much of its centre is built from.

Before the Spanish arrived it was Atonayalco, "across the river", under the Tecuexe lordship. Cristóbal de Oñate took the area in 1530, and families from Nochistlán resettled it in the mid-16th century. It was first San Miguel del Ojo de Agua, then San Miguel de los Alcalanes, after a Spanish family named Alcalá who settled east of Friar Miguel de Bolonia's chapel in 1571. A column in the church atrium marks the spot where, by the town's own history, the Franciscans laid it out in 1625.

It became a villa in 1880 and a city in 1970, and lived through royalist reprisals in 1813 and the Cristero War of the 1920s. In March 2001 INAH declared its centre a Zone of Historic Monuments for its churches and stone houses. The patron saint is Michael the Archangel. The climate is mild, averaging 17.6 °C, with summer rain.