Nueva Villa de Padilla

Nueva Villa de Padilla is a town built in one go in 1970 to take in the residents of a place that was about to vanish. Old Villa de Padilla, on the banks of the Purificación River, lay inside the basin of the Vicente Guerrero dam, also called Las Adjuntas, built to hold back floods on the Purificación, Corona and Pilón rivers. In September 1970 Governor Manuel A. Ravizé held the Independence celebrations there as the last official act, and in January 1971 the water covered the town. Many families rushed to the cemetery to rescue the remains of their dead; others stayed under the water. The new town, laid out on higher ground beside the reservoir about 150 metres above sea level, is the seat of Padilla municipality and has around 5,000 people.

What was lost matters in the state's history. José de Escandón founded the town on 6 January 1749 with 41 settlers, as San Antonio de Padilla. From 5 July 1824 to January 1825 it was the capital of newly created Tamaulipas and the seat of its first constituent congress. On 19 July 1824 Agustín de Iturbide, Mexico's first emperor, was executed there by firing squad after returning through Soto la Marina despite having been declared an outlaw; he was buried beside the church of San Antonio de Padua, and in 1838 his remains were moved to Mexico City Cathedral. In 1832 General Manuel de Mier y Terán took his own life in the same house where Iturbide spent his last night.

The reservoir is huge: about 39,000 hectares and 3,900 million cubic metres, the sixth-largest in Mexico. When the level falls below 30 per cent in long droughts, the Miguel Hidalgo school, the ruins of the San Antonio de Padua church, the outline of the plaza with the base of its bandstand, the wall where Iturbide was shot and the open tombs of the cemetery rise from the water. The rest of the time the dam is a destination for largemouth bass fishing, with camps such as Lago Vista, Alta Vista, La Retama, El Pelícano and La Trinidad offering rooms, boats and docks, and it draws thousands of duck and white-winged dove hunters. The new town's plaza has monuments to Juárez and to the agrarian leader Juan Báez Guerra. Saint Anthony of Padua is celebrated on 13 June, and the local dish is pansaje, chunks of beef cooked with potato, bell pepper and green chilli.