Villa de Guadalupe

Before it took its present name this was the Represadero congregation, hemmed in by the haciendas of Solís, Vallejo and San Judas; Solís alone covered two thirds of today's municipality. By the mid-19th century the trade in ixtle fibre was so busy that people called the place "Villa del Ixtle". The state legislature made it a villa on 17 December 1857, and the name Villa de Guadalupe was chosen at the request of the bishop of San Luis. Fewer than a thousand people live in the town today.

From 1862 the stagecoach road from San Luis Potosí to Monterrey ran through here: coaches left Charcas at five in the morning, passed the Solís hacienda, stopped in the villa for breakfast and went on to Matehuala and Cedral. President Benito Juárez spent the night of 27 December 1863 in town on his way north, and dated a letter to his son-in-law Pedro Santacilia from here. A few years earlier, on 17 February 1858, the Solís hacienda saw the first battle of the Reform War on San Luis Potosí soil, won by Mariano Escobedo. French columns and Foreign Legion battalions came through in 1864-1866.

The church became a parish in 1887, and its image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was crowned in 1959. The journalist Teodoro Torres, who founded Mexico's first school of journalism, was born here in 1884. The municipality still makes mesquite-wood barrels and ixtle goods, and local food runs to chicken tamales, jacube, requesón cheese and red enchiladas, with pulque or mezcal.