San Pablo Tepetzingo

About 7 km from central Tehuacán, San Pablo Tepetzingo is one of the villages ringing Puebla's second city. Its name is Nahuatl: tepetl, hill, tzin, diminutive, and co, place, so "on the little hill"; its patron is Saint Paul. It had 2,785 people in 2020 and stands at about 1,400 m. Its church keeps images such as the small statue of the Holy Trinity in the photo.

The municipality of Tehuacán, with over 327,000 people in 2020, is known as the "cradle of maize" because some of the oldest remains of the crop were found in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán valley. The landscape is semi-arid: almost 60% of the municipality is scrub, with mesquite and some dry forest, mean temperatures run from 12 to 24 °C, and rain is just 400 to 800 mm a year. Its year-round streams are the Tehuacán, La Huertilla and Zapotitlán rivers, all in the Papaloapan basin, and from underground come the mineral waters that made the city famous.

The region works the pottery of Los Reyes Metzontla, onyx and palm, and in season cooks mole de caderas, the goat stew that marks autumn in Tehuacán.