José Cardel

José Cardel, usually just called Cardel or Ciudad Cardel, is a town in central Veracruz about 30 km north of the port of Veracruz and the seat of the municipality of La Antigua. It had 20,165 people at the 2020 census, out of 28,682 in the whole municipality, and lies about 20 m above sea level on the hot coastal plain. It sits where Federal Highway 180, the coast road that runs north and south along the Gulf, meets the routes inland to Xalapa and the centre of the country, which makes it the place where most travellers change buses or turn off for the beaches and ruins of the area.

Cardel began as a small settlement along the tracks of the Ferrocarril Interoceánico. When the Veracruz–Xalapa railway was finished around 1892, a station was set up at San Francisco de las Peñas, partly on land donated by Francisco S. Lara, a wealthy landowner and mayor of La Antigua. Workers at the nearby El Gallo Verde sugar mill, now called El Modelo, built their houses beside the line. Thanks to the railway the village outgrew La Antigua, and a decree moved the municipal seat to San Francisco de las Peñas from 1 January 1913; it was reversed the next year, but on 1 April 1925 the change became final. The village was then raised to the rank of villa and renamed José Cardel, after an agrarian leader who had helped found the state's league of peasant communities in 1923 and was later killed. It became a city by a decree of 30 October 1975.

Cardel is a working town rather than a tourist one. Its economy rests on sugar cane, with the El Modelo mill in town and the La Gloria mill close by, and it grew again in the 1980s when the Laguna Verde nuclear power station was built a few kilometres up the coast. The centre is a broad palm-lined main park with the town's name in coloured letters, surrounded by the central market, banks, shops and a few hotels and restaurants. It is a practical base for day trips: La Antigua and its colonial ruins are about 10 km south, the beach and dunes of Chachalacas and the Totonac city of Cempoala are each about 10 km away, and Quiahuiztlan and Villa Rica are about 40 km up Highway 180.