Lerdo de Tejada

Lerdo de Tejada is a sugar town on the coastal plain of southern Veracruz, just 10 metres above sea level and about 207 km by road south-east of Xalapa. It is the seat of the municipality of the same name and holds more than 90 per cent of its people: 17,727 at the 2020 census. It is named after Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the Xalapa-born president of Mexico.

People lived here long before the Spanish. The Codex Mendoza names Tlazintla, a calpulli of Tlacotalpan located in what is now Lerdo, and after the conquest the spot served as the landing for one of New Spain's first sugar mills, the one Hernán Cortés built near San Andrés Tuxtla. Today's town began as the ranchería of San Francisco Naranjal, founded around 1876 by settlers from San Andrés and Santiago Tuxtla. In 1899 the San Francisco sugar works, one of the most modern sugar and alcohol plants in Mexico at the time, opened beside it, and Naranjal grew so fast that in 1901 it became the seat of the Saltabarranca municipality. It split off as a municipality of its own in 1923, took the name Lerdo de Tejada that same year, and was made a city in 1967. In the mid-1940s it was still linked to the port of Alvarado by river, and in 1950 President Miguel Alemán opened the Alvarado–Lerdo–San Andrés Tuxtla highway.

Sugar cane is still the backbone of the economy, although falling sugar prices after 2011 shut the San Francisco Naranjal mill; the San Pedro mill south-west of town keeps grinding and produced 119,150 tonnes of sugar in the 2014–2015 season. Water surrounds the town: streams feeding the Alvarado lagoon, estuaries, the small Laguna del Márquez on the border with Ángel R. Cabada and, shared with Alvarado, the La Popotera wetland, a Ramsar site drained by the San Agustín River, a tributary of the Papaloapan. The climate is hot and humid, with heavy summer rain.