Analco de Ponciano Arriaga

Its name has two layers. Analco comes from Nahuatl atl, water, and nalco, the other side, and translates as "on the other side of the water"; the Ponciano Arriaga part honours the deputy who sat in the Constituent Congress of 1856. Locally it is also called Santa Cruz Analco. It had 3,027 residents in 2020 and its houses sit at 2,380 metres in the flat part of the municipality of San Salvador el Verde, about 16 km in a straight line north of Huejotzingo and 41 km northwest of Puebla city. The satellite image shows white rows of greenhouses and the ravines that cut across the fields.

The municipality, called Xopalican in Nahuatl, "green place", covers almost 109 km² and climbs from about 2,300 metres on the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley floor to 5,200 metres on the summit of Iztaccíhuatl, the country's third-highest mountain, which marks its western edge. It borders Tlahuapan, San Matías Tlalancaleca, San Martín Texmelucan, Chiautzingo and Huejotzingo, plus Tlaxcala and the State of Mexico, and belongs to the Puebla-Tlaxcala metropolitan area. Four in ten hectares are forest and a little over a third is farmed. Rain falls from May to October, 900 to 1,100 mm a year, and in winter the high ground drops below freezing.

The soil here is generous with vegetables: cabbage, onion, coriander, cauliflower, green beans, peas, radish and carrot grow beside maize, beans, broad beans and wheat, along with tejocote, pear, apple and walnut, plus gladioli, chrysanthemums and roses. The municipality's stonecutters work black and volcanic stone into molcajetes, metlapiles, millstones, fountains and grave monuments. In the kitchen the stars are carnitas with salsa and handmade tortillas, cacahuacintle corn biscuits, capulín, tejocote and chilacayote sweets and xemezcal, maguey heart baked in an earth oven; to drink, pulque, aguardiente and pinole atole. There are no banks or cash machines in the municipality and no wholesale market, so bring cash.