Los Otates

In Los Otates, bread is part of who people are. Baking and pastry-making are the village's signature trade, and every 13 November, at the blessing of the bread in honour of San Diego de Alcalá, families bake far more than they need so they can hand out bread and food free to anyone who turns up. It is the village's biggest celebration and one of the best known in the area. The other fiesta is for Saint Rose of Lima, the patron saint, on 30 August.

The village, home to 1,036 people in 2020, lies in a broad ravine between two lines of hills running down from the Sierra Madre Oriental, at about 530 metres, in the western part of Actopan municipality. The climate is warm, with summer rains and a dry winter, averaging close to 25 °C. The name comes from otate, a kind of tall cane that once grew thickly along the stream running through the village, which turns into a strong river in the rainy season.

Its history runs deep. Pottery and obsidian points from a Totonac settlement have been found on Cerro Montoso, also called La Capilla, and the Actopan ravine carried the old indigenous route to Xalapa; some historians hold that Hernán Cortés came through on 17 August 1519. In colonial times the land was a cattle estate, and one heiress, Catarina de la Oliva Domínguez, left a large share to the families who worked it, on condition that they build a bigger chapel to Saint Rose. The church's oldest bell is dated 1766, the tower was added in 1879, and it became a parish in 1973.

On top of Cerro Montoso stand the ruins of La Capilla, a college that Josephite missionaries built between 1901 and 1907, abandoned during the Revolution and gutted by fire in 1945. Close by is Poza Azul, a spring of very clear water that feeds a small stream into the Actopan River, and visitors to the area also go to El Descabezadero, where the Actopan River bursts out of a cliff and people abseil and raft. Farms here grow mostly mangoes and chayote, plus coffee, maize, beans and tomatoes.