Cerro Pizarro

Cerro Pizarro is a 3,080 m conical volcano in the municipality of Tepeyahualco in eastern Puebla. It stands on the Llanos de San Juan, the closed, semi-arid basin it shares with Las Derrumbadas and the region's crater lakes, next to the villages of San Nicolás Pizarro and Guadalupe Sarabia. Federal toll highway 140D (Amozoc–Xalapa) wraps around its north side. A few kilometres west, north and east begins the Los Humeros malpaís, the lava field where the pre-Hispanic city of Cantona flourished, and to the south lies El Salado, one of the basin's two large seasonal salt lakes.

Although it is made of rhyolite, Pizarro was not built by a single eruption: geologists describe it as a polygenetic volcano with some features of a stratovolcano. It began forming about 220,000 years ago in three eruptive episodes in fairly quick succession, and a fourth, about 65,000 years ago, pushed up the dome you see today.

Rain is scarce, a little under 500 mm a year and mostly in summer, and the mean temperature is about 14 °C. The slopes carry dry scrub that turns into mixed forest near the top, with piñon and smooth-leaf pine, alligator juniper, scrub oak, madrone, sotol, agaves and barrel cacti; rabbits, coyotes, grey foxes and birds of prey live here. It is a moderately popular hike: the outing fits in half a day, about 6 km with 650 m of ascent, and the summit looks out over the whole Oriental valley and the high peaks around it.