San Sebastián Villanueva

While the floor of the Tepeaca Valley sits around 2,100 metres, San Sebastián Villanueva lies higher, at 2,317, in the northern strip of Acatzingo municipality where the land begins to climb toward the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, which reach 2,500 metres here. The 2020 census counted 8,287 residents. Its name honours the martyr Saint Sebastian, the village's patron. In a straight line it is about 50 km from the state capital and about 31 km from Ixtenco, across the border in Tlaxcala, with the bulk of La Malinche volcano as a landmark to the northwest.

Acatzingo comes from the Nahuatl Acatzinco, which translates as place of small reed beds. The municipality covers 125 km² and belongs to the Tepeaca Valley, the eastern extension of the great Puebla–Tlaxcala plain, whose subsoil holds large deposits of limestone and marble. Almost three quarters of the land is farmed, barely 6% keeps any forest and a similar share is grassland; the streams are seasonal and everything drains to the Atoyac basin. The climate is temperate, with averages of 12 to 18 °C and 600 to 900 mm of rain a year, mostly in summer. The dominant soils are cambisols, heavy clays that yield well with fertiliser but are hard to work.

Life in the area's villages revolves around the municipal seat, Acatzingo de Hidalgo, a dozen kilometres to the southwest. There stands the sixteenth-century Franciscan convent, whose church keeps remains of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century altarpieces and a monolithic baptismal font showing the Eucharist held by angels; also the 47-arch Portal Hidalgo and the eighteenth-century sanctuary of the Virgen de los Dolores, with paintings by Miguel Jerónimo Zendejas. Every September nearly eight kilometres of carpets made of sawdust, dyed sand and chopped alfalfa are laid for that Virgin's procession, and the street market sets up on Tuesdays. The municipality's ironworks build truck bodies and campers, and the local table means carnitas, mole and tamales, with palanquetas and jamoncillo for dessert.