Aljibes

In May 1920 the huge train convoy in which Venustiano Carranza was trying to reach Veracruz came to a final halt at this spot. Rebels of the Plan of Agua Prieta, who had already clashed with him shortly before at the neighbouring Rinconada station, attacked again here; the loyal troops lost, and further on the rebels had torn up the rails, so the way to the port was closed. From Aljibes the president and a handful of aides rode on horseback towards the Sierra Norte, where days later he was betrayed and killed at Tlaxcalantongo. A monument to Carranza at Paso Puente, in the same municipality, recalls that retreat.

The hamlet began as a stop on a branch of the Mexico City–Veracruz railway, exactly halfway between Rafael Lara Grajales and Esperanza, and when commercial passenger service ended it lost almost all its reason to exist. Today it is tiny: 110 people in 2020, at about 2,400 m, a little south of San Salvador el Seco and some 59 km in a straight line from Puebla city. Around it spreads the high plain of eastern Puebla, where two thirds of the municipal land is farmed and the rest is mostly grassland, with some forest on the hills. Streams flow only seasonally, draining to the Atoyac basin and the Totolzingo lagoon; average temperatures are just 13 to 15 °C.

San Salvador el Seco, a municipality of about 221 km² lying between 2,300 and 3,000 m, has a stonecutting tradition: black volcanic rock is carved into molcajetes, metlapiles, millstones, fountains and gravestones. Local food includes carnitas with handmade tortillas and salsas, cacahuacintle corn biscuits, chilacayote sweets, xemezcal (maguey heart cooked in an earth oven) and capulín and tejocote jams, with pulque, aguardiente and pinole atole to drink. The municipality is proud of its four brass bands, which play at the fiestas.