Bellavista de Victoria

The town's surname is no accident: Victoria honours Guadalupe Victoria, Mexico's first president. Official records also list it as San José Bellavista, and under that name it is one of the six auxiliary boards (juntas auxiliares) of Palmar de Bravo, alongside San Sebastián Cuacnopalan, San Miguel Xaltepec, Cuesta Blanca, Jesús Nazareno and La Purísima de Bravo. That means it has its own auxiliary president and four councillors, elected by residents in a vote on the last Sunday of March every three years, who take office on the following 15 April.

It is growing fast. It went from 2,492 people in 2010 to 3,160 in 2020 (1,605 women and 1,555 men), living in 709 occupied homes, and almost one in six residents was under six years old. Over that decade piped water went from about three quarters of homes to practically all of them, and households with a mobile phone rose from a quarter to nearly three in four; home internet, by contrast, reached only one in ten. Almost no one speaks an indigenous language. It sits at 2,225 metres, about 72 km in a straight line from Puebla city and 46 km from Orizaba, surrounded by farmland; Santa Cruz Monterrosas lies about 2 km north, and beyond rise Loma Grande, 2,705 m, and Cerro Carbonero, 2,636 m.

Palmar de Bravo covers 363 km² in the east of the state, in the Ciudad Serdán region, between 2,100 and 2,900 metres, and had 50,226 people in 2020. It borders Quecholac, Chalchicomula de Sesma, Esperanza, Cañada Morelos, Tlacotepec de Benito Juárez, Yehualtepec and Tecamachalco. Nearly all of it is semi-dry and cool, averaging 12 to 18 °C with 300 to 700 mm of rain a year; more than three fifths of the land is farmed, and the rest is mostly scrub with a little forest. The municipal seat keeps the church of San Agustín, from the late 16th century. Locals weave palm goods and twist ixtle ropes, and the kitchen is known for barbacoa in mixiote, mole poblano, chiles en nogada and candied squash, with pulque and fruit infusions.