Nueva Italia

Nueva Italia de Ruiz is the seat of Múgica municipality and, with 32,328 people in 2020, the second-largest town of Michoacán's Tierra Caliente after Apatzingán. It sits at about 420 metres in the Balsas depression, hot all year, with temperatures from 10 to 41 °C and an average near 26 °C.

In the early 1900s this was the Ojo de Agua hacienda, home to some twenty families growing rain-fed maize and raising a few cattle. In 1903 it passed to the family of the Italian Dante Cusi, who renamed it Nueva Italia, brought water from the Marqués river through a steel-pipe siphon and turned the grassland into fields of rice, cotton, melon and lime; Italian workers he hired were among the first settlers. In 1938 Lázaro Cárdenas's government expropriated the hacienda and handed it out as an ejido of over 22,000 hectares. In 1942 the town broke away from Parácuaro as the seat of a new municipality, Zaragoza, renamed Múgica in 1969; "de Ruiz" honours the Michoacán historian Eduardo Ruiz.

Avenida Lázaro Cárdenas, four lanes wide, is federal highway 37 as it passes through town. At Cuatro Caminos on the south side, roads to Uruapan, Apatzingán, Lázaro Cárdenas and Morelia meet, which is why locals call it the road hub of Michoacán. Farming still drives the place: maize, cucumber, mango and lime. Local dishes are morisqueta, enchiladas, goat birria and mojarra. In January 2014 the self-defence militias took the town after hours of fighting with the Knights Templar cartel.