San Esteban Cuautempan

The Nahuatl name says it all: cuautli, tentli and pan read as "at the edge of the forest", and nearly half of Cuautempan municipality is still wooded. San Esteban Cuautempan, the municipal seat, sits at about 1,503 metres in the foothills of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, where the municipal land climbs from 800 to 2,600 metres. In 2020 the town had 1,232 residents; Tetela de Ocampo is only 11 kilometres away and Tulancingo, across the line in Hidalgo, 62.

Before the Spanish conquered the area in 1521, it was Totonac country. In the nineteenth century the place belonged to the district of Tetela, and in 1895 it became a free municipality. Its oldest building is the parish church of San Esteban, which INEGI dates to the sixteenth century. The municipality covers 84.5 square kilometres, borders Zongozotla, Huitzilan de Serdán, Tetela de Ocampo and Tepetzintla, and more than five thousand of its people speak an Indigenous language, mainly Nahuatl and Totonac.

It rains heavily here, between 1,100 and 2,100 millimetres a year, under humid temperate climates with a warmer belt, and the water drains to the Tecuantepec River, a tributary of the Tecolutla, which reaches the Gulf. The Citlalpepetl and Zempoala streams flow all year. Mountain cooking includes clove mole, smoked chicken, pressed chicharrón, tlacoyos and mixiote, and local crafts are reed and wool weaving, pottery, wood carving for building and hand-made wooden spoons. The violin is the instrument of local folk music.