Tepanco de López

Tepanco de López is the seat of the municipality of the same name in south-eastern Puebla, though with about 3,400 people it is only the municipality's third-largest place. It stands at about 1,810 m. The name Tepanco can be read as "at the boundary", "at the stony ground" or, from its glyph, "place of stone walls"; all point to the hills that here divide the Tehuacán valley from the Tecamachalco valley. The surname López was added on 27 April 1869 by decree of the Puebla congress, honouring the liberal guerrilla José María "el Güero" López, born here, who distinguished himself in Oaxaca during the French Intervention.

Facing the main square stands the 18th-century church of San Juan Bautista, seat of the parish of San Juan Tepanco in the diocese of Tehuacán. It has a single tower, Baroque in its lower stage and late Neoclassical at the top, with three stages, a clock and a dome topped by a cross, and a Latin-cross plan with a ribbed barrel vault. Inside are carved wooden Baroque altarpieces with estípite and Solomonic columns; in the transept, two large canvases by Rafael Ximeno y Planes, The Virgin of the Apocalypse and The Sorrowing Women at the Foot of the Cross, plus a Baroque Virgin of Guadalupe and a Holy Burial with an articulated Christ in a glass coffin. The atrium is enclosed by a wall with four posa chapels on the processional route.

The patron-saint feast of Saint John the Baptist is on 24 June.