Villa Hidalgo

Villa Hidalgo is the seat of the municipality of the same name on the high plateau of San Luis Potosí, at 1,670 metres, with a dry, mild climate. Around 3,000 people live in the town and about 15,000 in the municipality as a whole.

The settlement began beside a jagüey, a small earthen reservoir north of today's centre owned by one Ambrosio Martínez. The hamlet that grew up there was called San José de los Picachos, for the cones, craters and maars (small explosion volcanoes) that ring it. It later became a district of the state capital known as El Tanquecito, and in 1857 it was made a municipality named Villa Hidalgo. Before the year was out it had been renamed Villa Iturbide, and it kept that name until the state legislature restored Hidalgo in the 1920s.

The heart of town is a small, well-kept plaza with a bandstand in the middle and arcades lined with shops and offices. The plain parish church of San José faces it; fireworks towers burn and dancers perform before it at fiesta time. Out in the countryside stand the shells of old haciendas: Peotillos, with the Carmelite house and its granaries; La Tapona, known for a vaulted colonial waterwheel well; and Corcovada. Near the crater called La Joya, caves hold the fossil cast of an ancient horse, the so-called Equus potosino, along with fossil plants.

The local craft is stone: carvers here make molcajetes from porous black rock. Local cooking runs to asado de boda, rabbit and quail, with pulque or colonche to drink.