La Antigua

La Antigua is a small village on the left bank of the Huitzilapan river, also called the río La Antigua, about 28 km north of the port of Veracruz and a few kilometres inland from the Gulf. It had 874 people at the 2020 census and lies 8 m above sea level, in the municipality of the same name, whose seat is now the town of José Cardel about 10 km away. Before the Spanish arrived there was a Totonac settlement here called Huitzilapan, Nahuatl for "river of hummingbirds".

The village is the third site of the town Hernán Cortés founded in 1519. The Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz started as a camp on the beaches facing San Juan de Ulúa, was soon moved north to the bay below Quiahuiztlan, and around 1524–1525 was moved again to this riverbank. It received the title of city in 1527, and for the rest of the 16th century it was the landing point for the trade between Spain and New Spain, with Franciscan and Dominican convents, a Jesuit house and three hospitals. In 1600 the viceroy, the Count of Monterrey, founded the Nueva Veracruz on the coast opposite San Juan de Ulúa; customs, the treasury and most residents moved there, and the old town became known as the Antigua Veracruz, later just La Antigua. It stayed small, living from fishing and farming, and it was the head of its municipality from 1824 until 1925, when the seat moved to the railway town that became José Cardel. On 6 June 2025 a presidential decree declared just over 10 hectares of the village a Zona de Monumentos Históricos, and INAH marked the 500th anniversary of its founding with a festival there in October and November 2025.

The protected zone holds seven historic buildings from the 16th to 19th centuries. The best known is the so-called Casa de Cortés, which tradition links to the conqueror but which INAH describes as an old customs house: walls of brick and coral stone around a courtyard, a water wheel, a bread oven and a cannon found by the river, all gripped by the roots of strangler figs that took hold after a 19th-century hurricane. The tiny whitewashed Ermita del Rosario, built in 1523–1524 and originally dedicated to Saint James, is described by INAH as the first Catholic chapel on the American continent. Around the Plaza de Armas are the old cabildo, restored in 2016 as the municipal library, the Parroquia del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje and the roofless walls of the barracks that Santa Anna's father built on the old stables in 1804. Near the river stands a great ceiba with branches over 20 m long, to which, according to legend, Cortés moored his ships. A suspension footbridge crosses the river, and boat rides leave from near it.