Tlalpujahua

History

The area was first Mazahua territory, then a disputed frontier between the Purépecha and Aztec empires. Gold had been worked here before the Conquest, and when the Spanish rediscovered the deposits in 1558 settlers poured in. The camp became the Real de Minas de Tlalpujahua in 1560, and in 1593 the first parish and the first blocks of a formal town were laid out. A new parish church followed in 1750, though the early mines began to give out by 1769.

Tlalpujahua was the hometown of Ignacio López Rayón. After Hidalgo's death he and his brothers fortified the Cerro del Gallo here, made arms, ran a printing press and drafted his Elements of Our Constitution, until royalists took the town in 1813. The war left most mines abandoned.

A second boom began in 1898 with the discovery of the vein that became the Dos Estrellas mine, a leading gold producer of the early 20th century. In 1937 a slide of mud and mine waste buried about a third of the town, and the mine closed in 1959. In the 1960s Joaquín Muñoz Orta began making Christmas ornaments, the craft that revived the local economy.