Catemaco

Catemaco is the seat of the municipality of the same name in southern Veracruz, strung for about 2.5 km along the western shore of Lake Catemaco in the middle of the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas. It sits about 360 m above sea level, some 160 km southeast of the port of Veracruz, and had 28,655 people at the 2020 census (49,451 in the whole municipality, which reaches north to the Gulf coast). The town lives from the lake and from visitors: its docks are classed as a fishing and tourism port, and most boat traffic is tourist launches, especially in holiday periods.

The name comes from Nahuatl and is usually translated as "place of the burned houses", said to recall an eruption of the San Martín volcano, though linguists dispute that reading. The area was settled long before the Spanish arrived and was part of the province of Santiago Tuxtla in colonial times; accounts of its founding vary, with some placing a pueblo de indios here in the 16th century and others giving 1774. Catemaco became a villa in 1881 and a city in 1966. Its tourism took off in the 1970s, built on the lake, the remaining rainforest and its reputation for brujería.

That reputation is the thing most Mexicans know about Catemaco. Local healers and sorcerers, most of them men, offer limpias (ritual cleansings) and other services that mix Catholic saints with pre-Hispanic belief, and the town hosts a yearly gathering on the first Friday of March, started in the 1970s by the brujo mayor Gonzalo Aguirre; it now draws around 200 healers, herbalists and fortune tellers. The rest of the year the life of the town is on the 1.5 km malecón, with vendors of charms and tegogolos (a freshwater snail eaten with lime and chile), and on the main plaza, where the Basilica of the Virgen del Carmen was begun in 1799 and finished in 1961, with a 21 m dome. The Virgin, the patroness of the municipality, is celebrated from 4 to 16 July with masses, music and a boat procession across the lake.