Huayacocotla

Huayacocotla is a mountain town and municipal seat in the far northwest of Veracruz, on a wedge of the state that pushes in between Hidalgo and Puebla. It sits at about 2,150 m in the Sierra de Huayacocotla, a branch of the Sierra Madre Oriental, far above the hot coastal plain that most visitors associate with Veracruz. The town had 6,113 people at the 2020 census and the municipality 21,796. Its name comes from Nahuatl and is usually read as "place of large trees", a nod to the pines that cover these ridges; in Otomí the town is called Mbati.

The first inhabitants of the area were Huastecs. Spanish evangelisation began around 1550, when Augustinian friars came from the convent of Atotonilco; work on the church started in 1565, was halted by epidemics, and the building was only finished in 1673. In colonial times Huayacocotla stood on a mule-train route towards central New Spain, collected the alcabala tax on passing goods and attracted wealthy Spanish families; later it lived from pine resin. In 1877 the head of the canton of Chicontepec moved here, and in 1881 the town became a villa. Apples and pears spread around Huayacocotla from 1946, and after decades of uncontrolled logging, the La Selva ejido received the first regulated timber permit in Veracruz in 1978 and won a national forestry merit award for 1990.

The stone parish church on the main square, beside the arcaded municipal palace, is the town's historic monument. Huayacocotla is also known across Mexico for its community radio, Radio Huayacocotla, which broadcast to the Indigenous villages of the sierra on short wave as XEJN-OC for about 30 years before moving to FM as XHFCE. The local crafts are woodwork, woollens and embroidery, the typical dishes are zacahuil and regional mole, and the music is the son huasteco.