Comalcalco

Comalcalco is a working city of about 43,000 people (2020) in the Chontalpa, the flat, wet lowland of western Tabasco, and the seat of a municipality of more than 200,000. It is the third city of the state after Villahermosa and Cárdenas, and locals call it the Perla de la Chontalpa. Its name is Nahuatl for "house of the comals", the flat griddles used for tortillas. The Maya city whose brick ruins stand just north of town flourished more than a thousand years earlier, but the present town was founded on 27 October 1827 as San Isidro de Comalcalco, on islands left in a dried-up bed of the Mezcalapa River.

Comalcalco became a municipality in 1834. On 8 October 1863 Colonel Gregorio Méndez rose here against the French intervention, the start of the uprising that eventually drove the imperial forces out of Tabasco, and in 1897 the state congress raised the town to a city. Today its economy rests on two things: oil, with large Pemex offices that run nearby fields, and cacao. The municipality is one of Mexico's main cacao producers, and family factories in and around town make drinking chocolate, bars and the cacao-and-corn drink pozol.

For visitors Comalcalco is the heart of the Ruta del Cacao. Cacao haciendas such as Hacienda La Luz, in town, and Hacienda Jesús María, to the south, offer tours of the groves and of how beans become chocolate, and the Comalcalco archaeological zone is a few minutes north. The center is small and walkable, with an arcaded main square, the municipal palace and the Mercado 27 de Octubre. A short taxi ride away, the village of Cupilco has the brightly painted church of the Asunción, and the Río Playa reserve, protected by its ejido, is good for birdwatching. Comalcalco is about an hour from Villahermosa, so it works as a day trip or an overnight stop.