Santa Isabel Tepetzala

Tepetzala joins two Nahuatl words, tepetl, hill, and tzalan, in the middle, and means "between the hills"; the first half of the name honours Saint Elizabeth, its patron. What surprises most is its size: 11,507 people lived here in 2020, nearly as many as in Acajete, the municipal seat, which lies barely a kilometre and a half to the west and with which it practically forms one sprawl of streets. The town sits at 2,441 metres in the centre-east of the state, about 28 km in a straight line from the city of Puebla.

Its most historic building is the church of Santa Isabel, which ranks among Acajete's monuments and dates to 1563. Close by stand the seat's parish church of Santa María de la Asunción, from 1650, and the Acaxetl cultural centre. The municipality is stone-carving country: metates, molcajetes, temolotes and metlapiles, the grinding tools of the traditional kitchen, are cut from rock here. Wind bands and orchestras play at the patron-saint fiestas, and the table offers mole poblano with turkey leg scattered with sesame, red rice, broad-bean tamales, the so-called tamales tontos made only with lard and salt, backbone mole, tlaxcales, barbacoa and chileatole.

Acajete spans 2,280 to 3,200 metres, from rolling alluvial plain up to volcanic slopes, and borders Tepatlaxco de Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Nopalucan, Tepeaca, Cuautinchán and Amozoc. More than half the land is farmed, a fifth is now built up and another fifth keeps its forest. It is cool most of the year, averaging 6 to 16 °C with 700 to 1,100 mm of rain. For fiestas people bake pan de burro, or festival bread, with orange-blossom water, walnuts and egg, and some families make glazed fig sweets, candied squash, coconut cocadas and quince jelly.