Teopantlán

Teopantlán is the seat of the municipality of the same name in central Puebla, south of the capital beyond the Sierra del Tentzo; it belongs to the Izúcar de Matamoros economic region. The village stands at about 1,420 m and had 2,751 people in 2020. The name comes from the Nahuatl teopan, church or temple, and tlan, place: "place of churches"; since the village's pre-Hispanic glyph shows a solar disc, it is also translated as "in the temple of Tonatiuh", the sun.

Before the Conquest the land was settled at different times by Olmec, Mixtec and Teotihuacan groups, and later the region fell to the Aztec garrison of Itzocan, today's Izúcar. In colonial times it depended on the church jurisdiction of Izúcar, in the 19th century it belonged to Izúcar's district, and in 1895 it became a free municipality.

The municipality, between 214 and 250 km² depending on the source, has rugged terrain dropping from 2,300 to 1,100 m. In the north, next to the capital, is the Sierra del Tentzo, dividing the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley from the Atlixco valley and the Mixteca; the centre lies in the Atlixco valley and the south in the lower Matamoros valley. All of it drains to the Atoyac, in the upper Balsas basin. It borders Ocoyucan, Puebla, Huehuetlán el Grande, Huatlatlauca, Coatzingo, Ahuatlán, Xochiltepec, San Diego la Mesa Tochimiltzingo and Atlixco.