Parque nacional Xicoténcatl

Xicoténcatl National Park is one of Mexico's more unusual protected areas: instead of a forest or a mountain, it protects a city and its surroundings. Lázaro Cárdenas signed the decree on 4 November 1937, at the urging of engineer Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, head of the Forestry Department, and it was published in the Diario Oficial on 17 November. It created a national park called "Xicoténcatl, Historic Monuments of Tlaxcala", meant to conserve the city's convents and churches and to replant the hills around them.

The decree names the Franciscan convent of San Francisco, which it calls the oldest in New Spain, the sanctuary of Ocotlán and the village of San Esteban Tizatlán. Its boundary starts at Tizatlán, runs down to a spot called the Palace of Zitlalpopoca and comes back past the place where the brigantines for the siege of Tenochtitlan were built. Today the park takes in Tlaxcala's historic centre and villages in the municipalities of Tlaxcala and Totolac such as Los Reyes Quiahuixtlán, San Francisco Ocotelulco and Santiago Tepeticpac, three of the four old lordships of Tlaxcallan. Wikipedia gives it about 600 hectares and SEMARNAT's tables 851. The land remains in the hands of its owners.

The landscape is a valley between two lines of hills, the highest being Oztol at about 2,460 metres and Tepepan at 2,320. Through the middle runs the Zahuapan River, which flows about 7 km through the capital and forms the border between Tlaxcala and Totolac. The slopes carry pine, oak and white cedar, with scrub of juniper, palo dulce, nopal and tepozán, and the riverbanks have ahuehuete cypresses, willows and ash trees. CONABIO records more than 380 species of plants and animals, seven of them listed as at risk; even inside the city there are rabbits, squirrels and opossums, and Mexican jays and curve-billed thrashers are easy to spot. The climate is mild, with summer rains.