Moyoapan

Moyoapan's name is not much of a sales pitch: it comes from Nahuatl móyotl, mosquito, and apan, river, so "river of mosquitoes". The village sits in the hills north of Ixtaczoquitlán, the municipality next door to Orizaba, at 1,174 metres, on the road that climbs towards Atzacan. With 2,297 residents in 2020 it is the ninth-largest community in the municipality.

What sets it apart in the municipal heritage list is the ruin of an old tobacco-drying house, one of only a handful of historic monuments recorded in Ixtaczoquitlán, alongside the church of the former Tuxpango hacienda and the remains of the first church at Zoquitlán Viejo. The village has its own park, a health centre, schools up to upper secondary and several churches, among them La Piedad; there are patches of woodland nearby.

The main date is 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph. The municipality has a mild, humid climate, and its farms grow chayote, oranges, maize, papaya, coffee and blackberries. Ixtaczoquitlán also holds a chapter of the War of Independence: in 1812 Morelos fought royalist troops at Escamela before taking Orizaba.