San Francisco "El Origen"

San Francisco "El Origen" is the Barrio Mágico of Puebla city, the first in the state. Mexico's federal tourism ministry awarded it on 29 June 2024 at the third Tianguis Internacional de Pueblos Mágicos in San Antonio, Texas, and it covers not one neighbourhood but four: San Francisco, El Alto, Analco and La Luz, old Indigenous barrios on the eastern edge of the historic centre, home to about 5,000 people.

The name is a reminder that the city started here. On 16 April 1531 the founding Mass of Puebla was said on the ground of today's Santa Cruz parish church in El Alto; frost and floods soon pushed the new town across the San Francisco river, and the Tlaxcalans who had come to build it stayed on the original site. For centuries that river divided the barrios from the Spanish city, until it was piped underground in the 1960s to make way for Bulevar Héroes del 5 de Mayo, which now forms the boundary.

The convent church of San Francisco, the first friary in Puebla, was begun in 1535 beside the royal road to Veracruz. Its facade of stone, brick and painted tiles, with fourteen large panels of flower vases, went up between 1743 and 1767, and one of its chapels holds the body of the Blessed Sebastián de Aparicio, a Franciscan lay brother. Beside it lies the Paseo de San Francisco, a park with hotels and a convention centre built in the 1990s.

Each barrio has its own character. El Alto keeps its market of cheap, hearty food and holds the Santa Cruz fair every 3 May. Analco, "across the river" in Nahuatl, has the Santo Ángel Custodio parish church of 1618, the Ovando bridge and a crafts, antiques and sweets market every weekend. La Luz was the potters' barrio: its workshops still turn out pots, casseroles and jugs of red-glazed earthenware, and the old Calle de Carrillo is named after the pottery workshop Gabriel Carrillo de Aranda opened there in 1689.