Santa María Huatulco

Santa María Huatulco is the original Huatulco: the inland town that is the seat of the municipality and gave its name to the whole resort on the bays. It sits at about 220 m in the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur, some 24 km by road northwest of La Crucecita and a few kilometres north of the coast highway, just west of the international airport. Its people are called huatulqueños.

The name comes from Nahuatl and is usually translated as the place where the wood, or the cross, is worshipped, after the cross that tradition says stood on the beach at Santa Cruz long before the Spanish came. The area was part of the Mixtec kingdom of Tututepec, and the Spanish gave Huatulco the title of town on 8 January 1539. In the early colonial period Santa Cruz was a busy Pacific port, which drew the English privateers Francis Drake in 1578 and Thomas Cavendish in 1587; local accounts say the burning of the coastal settlement pushed its people inland to Santa María. One fragment of the old cross is said to be kept in the town's church.

Today Santa María is a quiet country town with a central plaza, a colonial-era parish church and the Palacio Municipal facing the square. Inside the town hall courtyard, the walls and ceiling of the main stairway carry the mural Huatulco: Our Past, Present and Future, painted in 2005 by local artist Rafael Ortega, which climbs from pre-Hispanic times to the modern resort. The town is also the gateway to the coffee country of the sierra, where organic fincas around Pluma Hidalgo and San Miguel del Puerto can be visited with a booking.