San Gabriel Tetzoyocan

Tezontle, the reddish porous volcanic stone, gave this village its name: Tetzoyocan is built from tezontli, yotl (quality) and can (place), meaning "place full of tezontle". The Christian half of the name belongs to its patron, the archangel Gabriel. With 6,667 residents counted in 2020, it is one of the larger communities in the municipality of Yehualtepec, whose seat lies about 6 km to the northeast as the crow flies. The village stands at 2,006 metres on the eastern edge of the Puebla highlands.

The municipal territory is almost entirely plain broken by low hills with rocky ground, plus a little low sierra and gently sloping valleys. Water divides here between two great watersheds: half the municipality drains to the Atoyac and the Balsas, the other half to the Salado, part of the Papaloapan basin that runs toward the Gulf. There are no permanent rivers, only seasonal streams and irrigation canals. INEGI describes a temperate sub-humid climate over three quarters of the area and semi-dry over the rest, with just 500 to 700 millimetres of rain a year.

The area was home to Nahua people before the Conquest; around 1604 it was gathered into a congregation of towns, in the 19th century it answered to the Tecamachalco district, and in 1895 Yehualtepec became a free municipality. Local crafts are varied: wool blankets, gabán ponchos and yarn, ixtle ropes pulled from maguey, brick, onyx chess sets and polished marble. The traditional women's dress is the woollen "sesote", worn with a rebozo shawl and braids tied with coloured ribbons, and the local drinks are pulque and aguamiel.