Tepapayeca

On top of Tepapayeca's main temple, a grass-covered stone mound, the walls of a chapel still stand; the Dominicans built it in the 17th century from the material of the ancient buildings, as a sign of the new faith. The ceremonial centre had five buildings; today you can see the main temple and, in the patio, a small pyramid, while the rest lies under the village houses. Locals say Ometeotl, the dual god, was worshipped here, but excavations turned up a fragment of a Tlaloc sculpture, suggesting the two shared the temple.

The site was settled around the year 1200, drawn by water and fertile land. Its pottery shows it sat on trade routes running from the Gulf to the southeast, and that its people were closer to the Mixtecs of Oaxaca than to their neighbours in Tlaxcala and Puebla. Shortly before the Conquest the Triple Alliance took it over to wrest that route from Mixtec control and left a strong garrison here. In the 16th century Paso y Troncoso described it as temperate land beside a river feeding many irrigation channels, with Castilian fruit trees and a shortage of firewood, which was brought from the volcano five leagues away. The ex-convent of the Purificación de Santa María dates from that era; both pyramid and convent were badly damaged in the September 2017 earthquakes.

Tepapayeca belongs to the municipality of Tlapanalá, in the sugarcane country near Izúcar de Matamoros, and had 1,670 residents in 2020 at about 1,362 metres. The panel translates its name as "soil close to stone walls" or "good and calm place". People live from farming and trade; the municipality grows sugarcane, peanuts, beans and sorghum. In 2013 INAH approved the project "Tepapayeca: timeless garrison of exchange and faith", which produced the book on Tlapanalá's history.