San Miguel Espejo

Just 15 kilometres in a straight line from Puebla's main square, San Miguel Espejo no longer feels like the city: at 2,411 metres, on the eastern edge of Puebla municipality, the village sits on the ridges left between several deep ravines that run northeast to southwest from the lower slopes of La Malinche. The satellite image shows two clusters of houses separated by one of those gullies, surrounded by long strips of farmland following the slope. The 2020 census recorded 3,409 residents. Its patron saint, who gives the first half of the name, is Saint Michael the Archangel.

Espejo was one of 138 localities in Puebla municipality in 2010, a territory that reaches far beyond the urban sprawl: it climbs from 1,980 to nearly 4,500 metres, with volcanoes, rolling plains and rocky ground, and borders Cuautlancingo, the state of Tlaxcala and Tepatlaxco de Hidalgo to the north, and Amozoc and Cuautinchán to the east. Although almost 42% of the municipality is built up, a quarter is still farmed, and grassland and forest together cover another 27%; this eastern fringe, toward the mountain, is one of the parts that keeps that rural character.

The climate here is temperate with summer rain, averaging 10 to 16 °C with 400 to 900 mm of rainfall depending on altitude; it turns semi-cold in the highest parts of the mountain. Water from this part of the municipality belongs to the Atoyac system, which takes in the Alseseca and the Actiopa before filling the Valsequillo dam south of the city. For anyone leaving Puebla, the village is a gateway to the landscape of ravines and cornfields on the slopes of La Malinche; and to get back to the urban side, just head down to the historic centre, with the former convents of San Agustín and Santa Inés, the Carolino building and the grey-stone city hall.