Mazamitla

History

Tradition holds that Mazamitla was founded by Nahua people in 1165. It belonged to the lordship of Tzapotlán and paid tribute to Tamazula, the head town of its province. In 1481 the Purépecha invaded the area in their push toward the salt flats of the Sayula lagoon, and they held it for some years until their defeat at the end of the Salitre War in 1510.

The Spanish arrived in early 1522, when Cristóbal de Olid and Juan Rodríguez Villafuerte, sent by Hernán Cortés to explore western Mexico, took the region. The people of Tzapotlán were assigned to Cortés, who named Antón Salcedo as encomendero.

During the War of Independence, insurgents under Francisco Echeverría fought in 1812 on the nearby Zapatero slope; Echeverría was badly wounded and died in Mazamitla. Later, during the French intervention, French soldiers burned the town's archives. From 1825 Mazamitla belonged to the canton of Sayula, and in 1878 it passed to the canton of Ciudad Guzmán. The state congress gave it the rank of town on April 19, 1894. In recent decades forest cabins and weekend tourism have become the mainstay of the local economy, and Mazamitla was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2005.