Tecajete

Tecajete is a 2,460 m volcanic hill in the north of the municipality of San Jerónimo Tecuanipan, close to the borders with Calpan and San Pedro Cholula. The village of San Miguel Papaxtla wraps around its south-east side. The name comes from the Nahuatl tecaxic, "in the stone bowl", after its bowl-shaped crater. It is modest next to the volcanoes ringing the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley, but because it rises from the flattest part of the valley it can be seen from far around.

It is a textbook cinder cone, a steep volcano of loose fragments with a wide crater, unlike Cerro Zapotecas, which is a shield volcano, or the hills of the Nealtican lava field. Around the 1940s or 1950s people from Papaxtla bought it and began digging out its tezontle, the red volcanic stone. Today there are three quarries, on the north-west, north and east slopes, which give it a broken look, especially from the Puebla city side. The quarrying is loosely controlled, since the local council largely follows traditional self-government, and has caused environmental damage and at least one death.

Even so, it holds the municipality's only woodland, with Chihuahua pine, yellow trumpetbush, hopbush, morning-glory trees and madrone. Although it is private land, villagers use it for walks and grazing. A short but steep path climbs to the old crater and its two peaks, the southern one the higher, where a small altar to the Sacred Heart remembers a Puebla family who went missing while climbing the hill.