Contepec

Contepec is a quiet farming town on the high plateau north of Tlalpujahua, in the far northeast corner of Michoacán, close to the borders of the State of Mexico and Querétaro. Its name comes from Nahuatl words meaning roughly "hill of pots," and the area was resettled by Otomí and Mazahua families in the 17th century, when Franciscan friars founded a convent here dedicated to Saint James.

The town is best known as the birthplace of the poet and environmentalist Homero Aridjis. As a boy he watched monarch butterflies gather every winter on Cerro Altamirano, the mountain that rises east of town, and he later became one of the leading voices in the campaign that led to the protection of their forests. Altamirano is now one of the units of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.

Beyond the butterflies, the municipality has old haciendas, a small municipal museum in a historic building known as La Finca, and the large Tepuxtepec reservoir on the Lerma River, built between 1926 and 1950 for hydroelectric power and irrigation. It is not a tourist town, which is exactly its charm.