Alhuaca

Just above the village, a little over a kilometre to the northeast, Cerro Zacatepec reaches 2,897 m. Alhuaca sits on the slope at 2,663 m, in the cool mountains of southeastern Puebla between Tehuacán and Orizaba. Its Nahuatl name joins atl, water, hua, possessive, and can, locative: "where there is water". In 2020 it had 1,891 residents, 1,014 women and 877 men, up from 1,655 in 2005, and it is the fourth most populous of the 57 localities in Vicente Guerrero municipality, whose seat is Santa María del Monte, about 5 km in a straight line to the southwest.

The climate is wet mountain weather: the annual mean barely reaches 12 °C, January is the coldest month and rainfall tops 1,100 mm, concentrated in June and the summer months. Four fifths of the municipality has a temperate subhumid climate, and forest covers almost 40% of the land, with farming on just over half. Water drains to the Papaloapan basin through rivers such as the Atoyac, Apatlahuaya, Tlaxitla and Xoxocotla, and the municipality has two permanent lakes, Laguna Chica and Laguna Grande. Other hills ring the village, such as Cerro Bola (2,829 m) to the east and Xocotegua (2,739 m) to the west.

About a fifth of residents identify as Indigenous; Nahuatl and Zapotec are spoken in the municipality. Services have improved: piped water reached 72% of homes in 2020, up from 43% in 2010, though only 5.5% had internet and four in ten households a mobile phone. There is no lodging in Alhuaca; the nearest hotels are in Santa María del Monte, about 8 km away, where most eateries are too. The town has the 16th-century parish church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The local craft is palm and reed weaving, and municipal cooking includes mole de caderas or de espinazo, totopos, tlaxcales and chileatole, with peach, tejocote and apple preserves, atole, chocolate, aguardiente and mezcal.