Tlapanalá

From Tlapanalá you look straight at Popocatépetl, as in the photo. The town, with 3,163 people in 2020, lies at about 1,400 m in south-western Puebla, between Atlixco, 27 km away, and Izúcar de Matamoros. Its name, from tlapana, to break, and tlan, place, translates as "place of breaks" or "in the broken ground".

The area was inhabited before the Conquest, as the Codex of San Luis Chalma and the Lienzo de Huaquechula show. In colonial times Dominicans evangelised it, it became a self-governing Indian town, and the Spanish brought sugar cane and haciendas that later became sugar mills. During the Revolution Zapatista bands took refuge here and even kept a barracks in town. The church of Santo Tomás de Aquino, the patron, dates from the 16th century, and the municipality keeps the former hacienda of San Luis Chalma and, at Tepapayeca, a pyramid and the 16th-century convent of the Purificación de Santa María, both protected by INAH. In 2013 the municipality and INAH published the book "Tlapanalá: cauce histórico e identidad".

The climate is warm and sub-humid, averaging 20 to 24 °C. Three quarters of the municipality's 84 km² are planted with cane, peanuts, beans and sorghum. The Ojo del Carbón pool is fed by a spring. Local cooking includes green pipián, tlanipa and fresh-corn tamales, pozole and squash sweets with brown sugar, and the municipality has two brass bands.