Santo Tomás Hueyotlipan

Its parish church went up in 1566, almost two centuries before the village stopped depending on another. Hueyotlipan was part of the lordship of Cuautinchan until 1753, when it won autonomy as an indigenous republic; in 1766 its own parish was founded, also covering San Miguel, San Francisco, San Simón and Santa Anna, and in 1895 it became a free municipality. The name joins huey, great, ohtli, road, and pan, on: "on the great road". The town had 6,053 residents in 2020 and sits at 2,027 metres, some 39 km in a straight line from Puebla.

It is the seat of a tiny municipality: 19.46 km² in all, with a single auxiliary town, San Miguel Zacaola. The territory is so small that over a third is already built up; just over half is farmed and the rest is pasture. It borders Cuapiaxtla de Madero and Mixtla to the north, Tlanepantla and Tochtepec to the south and Tecamachalco to the east, and Tepeaca also adjoins it to the north. The climate is mild and steady, averaging 16 to 18 °C with 600 to 700 mm of rain in the summer season; its waters drain to the Atoyac in the Balsas basin.

In the centre, besides the 16th-century parish church, a bandstand and a bust of Benito Juárez frame the square. The cooking is the region's: mole poblano, pipián, bean and chilli tamales, pumpkin sweets and tejocote preserves, all washed down with pulque. Hueyotlipan makes a good stop for anyone touring the valley between Tepeaca and Tecamachalco: a village on a human scale, ringed by fields, where colonial history is written in the dates of its church and its autonomy.