San Baltazar Tetela

The Valsequillo reservoir is not a single lake. A natural peninsula cuts it into two bodies of water with different circulation and chemistry, and that tongue of land is San Baltazar Tetela. Studies of the reservoir call the passage the San Baltazar Threshold. The village belongs to the municipality of Puebla, about 15 km in a straight line from the city centre in the south of the municipal territory, and INEGI counts it as an urban locality: 4,224 inhabitants in 2020, in 949 occupied homes, at 2,047 metres above sea level. Close by are Buenavista Tetela to the north and Los Ángeles Tetela to the southeast.

Tetela comes from Nahuatl tetetl, plural of tetl, stone, plus tlan, a place where something abounds: "stony ground", the place of many stones. San Baltazar refers to King Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men, the locality's patron. Politically it is one of the seventeen juntas auxiliares into which the municipality of Puebla is divided besides the seat. Each one elects, by plebiscite on the last Sunday of March, an auxiliary president and four councillors, who govern for three years starting the following 15 April.

The reservoir, officially named Manuel Ávila Camacho, was built where the Atoyac river had carved a canyon known as the Balcón del Diablo, and at 405 million cubic metres it is the largest body of water in the municipality. It also takes in the streams that run down from La Malinche, such as the Alseseca, and works as a settling basin: it slows the water, holds back solids and metals, and water hyacinth acts as a filter. For the same reason it carries the pollution of the Atoyac, Zahuapan and Alseseca, and its water is not drinkable. Around it, at the foot of the Tentzo range, stretch the municipality's largest grasslands, with soils badly eroded by the reservoir and by grazing.