San Agustín Etla

San Agustín Etla is a town on the mountainside above the Etla valley, about 19 km northwest of Oaxaca City, at roughly 1,750 m. It was founded in 1583, had about 4,200 residents in 2020 and is the seat of its own municipality in the Etla district. Mountain streams gave the town its industrial past and still shape its walks, and its 18th-century church, with tall slender towers, looks out over the valley.

In 1883 the Sáenz Trápaga and Zorrilla family founded the Hilados y Tejidos La Soledad Vista Hermosa mill here, using the mountain water to spin and weave cotton, and a hydroelectric plant on the same stream later supplied power to Oaxaca City. After the mill closed, the painter Francisco Toledo led its conversion into the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, known as CaSa, which opened in 2006 and calls itself the first ecological arts centre in Latin America. The restored mill, with its yellow facade and grand stairway, holds exhibition halls, a library and workshops in printmaking, photography, textiles, ceramics and jewellery, and runs residencies and free film screenings. The old power plant nearby became Arte Papel Vista Hermosa, a workshop where paper is made by hand from plant fibres and natural dyes.

A stone aqueduct from the late 1800s still carries mountain water to the town, and the narrow path beside it has become one of the area's favourite walks, running up the valley from the water treatment plant to the abandoned hydroelectric plant. San Agustín is also known across Oaxaca for its Muerteada on the night of 1 November, when comparsas parade through the streets behind brass bands and act out, in rhyming verse full of gossip and political jokes, the story of a dead man brought back to life by a spiritist, while a devil tries to lure him away.