Acatzingo de Hidalgo

Acatzingo de Hidalgo, seat of Acatzingo municipality, stands at 2,140 m in the Tepeaca valley between La Malinche and Pico de Orizaba, whose snowy summit shows above the main square on clear days. With 31,599 people in 2020 it is a sizeable town rather than a village. The name comes from Nahuatl Acatzinco, "in the little reed beds".

Franciscan friars arrived on 13 May 1524 and by 1528 had finished the convent of San Juan Evangelista, built by Fray Juan de Rivas. The monolithic font, carved with the Eucharist held up by angels, dates from the same year, and the municipal encyclopedia suggests it may have been the first in New Spain. The octagonal fountain on the square is from 1591 and the sanctuary of the Virgen de los Dolores from 1764. Facing the square runs the Portal Hidalgo, 47 arches long and reckoned the largest in Puebla's colonial towns. To the north, by the Tetzahuapan river, are pre-Hispanic mounds known as teteles, and the Tetela barrio, founded in 1525, is the oldest of the town's fourteen neighbourhoods.

Wars passed through too: royalist troops were beaten here in 1811, liberals took the town in 1859 and French troops were stationed here in 1862. It became a villa named after Hidalgo in 1872 and the seat of the municipality in 1895.

Devotion to the Virgen de los Dolores sets the calendar. Legend says an innkeeper found the image in a traveller's chest that was never collected. In the week before Holy Week there is a fair, and the image is lowered from its niche so people can kiss it. On 15 September, after days of work, the streets are covered with nearly eight kilometres of carpets of sawdust, dyed sand and chopped alfalfa for the procession. The patron, Saint John the Evangelist, has an all-night procession on 27 December. Market day is Tuesday, and local ironworkers build truck bodies and campers.