Santiago

Santiago lies on Puebla's eastern edge, in a municipality that borders Jalacingo, already in Veracruz, and that only five years after becoming a free municipality, in 1900, found itself in a boundary dispute with the neighbouring state. The village, whose patron is Saint James the Greater, sits at 1,889 metres and had 1,147 residents in 2020. Teziutlán is 6 km away, Xalapa about 52 km and the city of Puebla 126 km. The photo shows one of the pyramids preserved beside the park of San Juan Xiutetelco, the municipal seat, very close by.

What defines this area is the slope. Xiutetelco covers about 145 km² and is set in the Sierra Norte, part of the Sierra Madre Oriental; its highest point is the Cerro de la Viola, and from there the land falls away east toward the Gulf Coastal Plain, while to the south it descends to the Llanos de San Juan. That is why the municipality holds four climates in bands, from the temperate highlands to the warm escarpment: according to INEGI, average temperatures range from 12 to 20 °C and annual rainfall from 500 to 2,100 mm, with a small semi-warm area that is wet all year.

Water here flows to the Gulf, within the basin of the Nautla River. The Jalacingo River crosses the east of the municipality from south to north for 15 km until it joins the María de la Torre, a tributary of the Nautla. Almost half the land is grassland, a third is farmed and around 12 % keeps its forest; as in most of the sierra, the original vegetation has largely gone, though patches of cloud forest remain. The traditional dress recorded by INEGI was a long black skirt, white blouse and rebozo for women, and for men white cotton trousers and shirt, a palm hat, sandals and a machete at the belt.