Misantla

Misantla is a city and municipal seat in the hills of central Veracruz, in the valley of the Misantla River on the northern side of the Sierra de Chiconquiaco, at roughly 300–400 m above sea level. It had 30,232 people at the 2020 census, out of about 65,800 in the whole municipality. The climate is warm and very wet, with around 2,000 mm of rain a year, and the surrounding hills grow coffee, oranges, sugar cane, chile and maize, with cattle on the lower land. The name is usually explained as "place of the deer" from Nahuatl, though some historians link it to Mazatecuhtli, "Lord Deer", a Chichimec leader who conquered the area. Locals also call it the land of the cachichín, a sour wild nut that was once common here.

The region was Totonac country. Chichimecs invaded in the late 12th century, and in the late 15th century Misantla was conquered by the Aztecs and became the centre of a tributary province that sent liquidambar resin to Tenochtitlan. After the conquest, the Franciscans gathered the scattered population into a town; on 20 January 1564, the feast of San Sebastián, it was moved from its old site to the present one at the meeting of the Palchán and Misantla rivers and renamed Santa María de la Asunción Misantla. Work on the parish church began in 1579 and went on for well over a century. In the 18th century the Totonacs of the area were noted vanilla growers. Misantla served twice as the provisional capital of Veracruz, during the US invasion of 1847 and the French intervention of the 1860s, and it was made a city on 6 September 1910. The road to Xalapa opened in 1974, and on 20 October 1995 the town suffered the worst flood in its history.

The centre is built around the white parish of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, with the old arcades known as Los Portales, the municipal palace (once the seat of the canton) and the Casa de la Cultura in El Calvario, a former convent with a small museum of crafts and regional dress. The town keeps a strong tradition of trío music. On 3 May it celebrates the Pocitos, the springs of Nacaquinia and El Zotuco, tied to the legend of a Totonac maiden whose tears formed the spring; it is said that whoever drinks there will come back. The patronal fiesta of the Virgin of the Assumption fills mid-August with dances, horse races and cockfights, and the founding of the town is celebrated every 20 January. Local dishes include empapatadas, chicken in chiltepín sauce and picadillo tamales. Around the town there are river pools such as La Villa for swimming and the Totonac archaeological sites of Páxil and Los Ídolos.