Venado

Venado sits at 1,790 metres on the San Luis Potosí plateau, on highway 63 as it heads on toward Charcas. About 6,400 people live in the town, the seat of a municipality of dry plains with the Sierra de Coronado, topping 2,600 metres, to the northeast.

The town grew out of a truce with the Guachichil people. Friar Diego de la Magdalena had already gathered them here beside a freshwater spring when, on 18 August 1591, part of the caravan of Tlaxcalan families that Viceroy Luis de Velasco sent north to teach farming settled alongside them. The place was named San Sebastián del Agua del Venado, and the Tlaxcalans called it Mazatepec, deer hill. A Franciscan friary stood here from 1593, the third in what is now the state, and in 2014 Venado became a sister town of Totolac in Tlaxcala.

Much of its later story is a long fight over land and water. In 1767 the town joined the riots against colonial officials, and José de Gálvez had gallows put up in the main square; the Crown only gave back its privileges in 1796. Miguel Hidalgo arrived on 1 February 1811 and spent three days in a house facing the old friary, even though the royalist Tamarindos battalion had been raised in this very town.

The landmark today is the Franciscan-built parish church, with a tall tower and a neoclassical front in pink sandstone. Local cooking runs to rabbit and red enchiladas, with mezcal, pulque and aguamiel, and people still weave henequen sacks and shoulder bags.