Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol de Cuautla

Dominican friars, based at Oaxtepec from 1528, evangelised the Amilpas villages, and in the 1580s they began a house at Santiago Cuautla that was finished in 1606, home to eight friars who served the surrounding villages. That is why the complex is also called the convent of Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The parish later passed to the secular clergy; in the 18th century it answered to the vicariate of Cuernavaca, and when Pope Leo XIII created the Diocese of Cuernavaca in 1891 it became one of its permanent vicariates. Its parish archive has been catalogued by the ADABI foundation.

Little of the 16th-century fabric survives; most of what you see dates from the 19th and 20th centuries. The neoclassical front has two tiers of plain pilasters, a central niche and a balustrade, flanked by twin three-stage towers whose top stages are octagonal, pierced by round windows and capped with conical domes. Inside is a single nave with red-painted columns and arches, two neoclassical side altars with Corinthian columns, and a high altar set in a half-dome with a crucifix between two angels. The eight-sided dome and its lantern carry four paintings, with more in roundels on the pendentives, from the late 19th or early 20th century, and two chapels open off the choir entrance.

Later works cut the old convent off from the church, and only its lower cloister of round arches remains. The former atrium became the city's main square, leaving the church a small railed forecourt hemmed in by street stalls. The earthquake of 19 September 2017 damaged the building.