Manlio Fabio Altamirano

Until 1937 nobody called this town Manlio Fabio Altamirano: it was Purga, or La Purga. There are two stories behind the old name. The usual one is about the railway: trains stopped here to refill the locomotive's water tank and blow down the boiler, a manoeuvre known in Spanish as a purga. The other credits a local fruit with purgative effects. In 1937 the municipality was created and named after Manlio Fabio Altamirano, a Veracruz lawyer and politician born in 1892, several times a federal deputy and a champion of workers and peasants, who was murdered in 1936 as governor-elect of the state.

The original village stood about 2 km to the south-east. On 1 January 1873 President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada opened the full line of the Ferrocarril Mexicano, which linked the port of Veracruz with Purga and Soledad on the way to Córdoba, and people settled along the tracks. With a station, a cattle loading dock and a weighbridge, Purga became a shipping point for cattle, fruit and maize, with big general stores where goods were still traded for crops and livestock, and bakeries known across the area. Earlier, in 1847, the priest Celedonio Jarauta had burned several houses here, and in 1862 French troops camped a kilometre from the village.

Today it is a quiet municipal seat of 6,076 people (2020), 49 metres above sea level, with a hot, dry climate, in the cattle and farming country of the Sotavento. The central park has a monumental clock, a bandstand and a statue of Manlio Fabio Altamirano, and the Porfirian-style railway station is the subject of a plan to turn it into a regional archaeological museum. The big fiesta is on 12 December, a fair for the Virgin of Guadalupe with dances, music and sports, and on 15 and 16 September the Independence cry in the park comes with a fair and a dance.