Ocotelulco

Ocotelulco is the archaeological site in the village of San Francisco Ocotelulco, in the municipality of Totolac, about 3 km from Tlaxcala city. It was one of the four lordships of Tlaxcallan and, when the Spanish arrived in 1519, the most powerful of them together with Tizatlán: its ruler was Maxixcatzin, a key figure in the alliance between the Tlaxcalans and the Spanish, and it held the region's great market, which Hernán Cortés described as drawing more than 30,000 people. The Nahuatl name is translated as "on the pine-covered hillock"; Friar Toribio de Motolinía read it as "in the pine quarter".

Today's village sits on top of the old town, founded around the 12th century. Jorge R. Acosta found the first walls in 1954 beside the church of San Francisco, and in 1990 INAH excavated a small temple with three building phases on the terraces north of it. The oldest phase held two painted features that are still the site's highlight: a bench 47 cm high and about 8 m long, decorated with skulls, hearts, hands and shields, and an altar with eight xiuhcoatl or fire serpents descending its sides. On its south face Tezcatlipoca appears among bloodied flint knives, in a style so close to the Codex Borgia that it points to contact with north-western Oaxaca.

Next door is the Ocotelulco Site Museum, opened in 1997 in a building painted in the colours and patterns of the local pre-Hispanic pottery. Its rooms cover daily life, religion and the colonial period, with polychrome codex-style ceramics such as a plate showing Tezcatlipoca as a bird, plus figurines, obsidian points, spindle whorls and bone needles. The garden is planted with maguey, nopal and avocado, and La Malinche volcano is in view.