Tapijulapa

History

Zoque people probably began settling this area around the 5th or 6th century. In caves near the village, the Tabasco poet Carlos Pellicer found archaeological pieces from the 8th to 10th centuries that suggest the caverns were used as ceremonial sites. When the Spanish arrived they called the region the Sierra de los Zoques.

Francisco de Montejo began the conquest of the area in 1529 and had it under control by about 1531. Franciscans founded a convent at nearby Oxolotán in 1572, Bishop Diego de Landa visited Tapijulapa in 1575, and the Dominicans who took over the convent built the church of Santiago Apóstol here at the end of the 17th century.

In the 1930s Governor Tomás Garrido Canabal bought a nearby property he called Villa Luz, with caves, waterfalls and sulfur springs, and fitted it with an airstrip, pool and rest house. Tapijulapa even served as municipal seat from 1934 to 1936. His anticlerical campaign turned the church into barracks and a school, though the building survived. The village was then neglected until 1979, when the state government restored its cobbled streets and house fronts and paved the road in. It was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2010. Holy Week brings the biggest crowds, for the traditional sardine fishing ritual.