La Gloria

La Gloria is a farming village in the municipality of Perote, set in the mountain-ringed Perote Valley south-west of the Cofre de Perote volcano. At about 2,460 metres it sits in one of the highest and coldest parts of Veracruz: the annual mean temperature is around 13.5 °C, and in January 2008 just over 4 cm of snow fell. The 2020 census counted 2,719 people. Farming is the main livelihood, and about half the population spends the working week in Mexico City, some 200 km to the west.

From its past the village keeps the chapel of the former Hacienda de La Gloria, a white-walled church with a bell tower capped by a small dome, listed among Mexico's historic monuments.

In April 2009 the village's name went round the world. About 8.5 km away is the pig-farming operation of Granjas Carroll de México, which raised nearly a million pigs in 2008 and had been the target of local protests. A wave of respiratory illness hit the village from December 2008, and in March a local boy became a confirmed case of the new virus; he recovered and became known as "patient zero". Several sources pointed to La Gloria as the origin of the H1N1 swine flu epidemic, but the Veracruz government denied it, and in May 2009 Mexico's agriculture ministry said it had found no trace of the virus in local pigs; no link has ever been proven. On 16 August 2009 a statue of the boy was unveiled in the central park.