Santo Domingo Tehuantepec

Santo Domingo Tehuantepec, usually just Tehuantepec, sits on the Tehuantepec River near the Pacific end of the Isthmus, about 20 minutes inland from the port of Salina Cruz and 26 km south-west of Juchitán. The town had 45,134 people in 2020 and forms one urban area with Salina Cruz and San Blas Atempa. It is low and very hot, and it has given its name to the isthmus, the gulf and the wind that blows through both.

The Zapotec kingdom of Zaachila pushed into the area under Cosijoeza in 1487 and made Tehuantepec its second capital; an Aztec army besieged it for seven months in 1496 without taking it, the Zapotecs having fortified the mountain of Guiengola nearby. Cosijopii, Cosijoeza's son, ruled when the Spanish arrived, and Dominican friars founded the colonial town in the late 1530s, starting their church and convent in 1544. On 21 March 1660 the people rose against the abusive alcalde mayor and killed him, an uprising recalled each March in the Guendaliza'a festival. The railway boom of the early 1900s, when the Isthmus line carried freight between the oceans, ended with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, leaving the town with an unfinished municipal palace.

The Dominican complex beside the main square is now the town's cathedral. Its former convent, known as the Ex Convento Rey Cosijopí, keeps traces of 16th-century murals and houses the Casa de la Cultura; damaged in the 2017 earthquake, it was restored by INAH and handed back in January 2025. Tehuantepec is a heartland of Isthmus Zapotec culture: women run the central market, the tehuana dress with its embroidered huipil and gold coins is worn for every fiesta, and Frida Kahlo made that costume famous. Each barrio has its own church, patron saint and vela, with processions, regadas and candle offerings; the Vela Sandunga at the end of May honours the song La Sandunga, whose lyrics are credited to Máximo Ramón Ortiz in 1853.