Peñuela

With 5,411 residents in the 2020 census, Peñuela is a sizeable community in the municipality of Amatlán de los Reyes, and barely changed from 2010, when it had 5,421. It sits at about 726 metres on Federal Highway 150, which runs through it as Avenida Hidalgo, roughly 3 km east-northeast of central Amatlán. To the west, the Córdoba–Peñuela boulevard reaches Córdoba within minutes, so day to day it works like another district of the Córdoba area.

The name is the diminutive of peña, a big boulder standing out on a hillside; locals are called peñuelenses. Its population curve is uneven: 1,170 people lived here in 1900, only 635 in 1930, and from the 1970s the town grew quickly, passing 4,600 by 1990.

The Mexico City–Veracruz railway via Córdoba had a station named Peñuela; El Jarocho, the passenger train on that route, stopped running in 1999 and only freight trains use the line now. On the Peñuela–Amatlán road, on Calle Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, stands the Universidad Veracruzana's Faculty of Biological and Agricultural Sciences for the Orizaba-Córdoba region, which keeps a steady flow of students in town. Farmland surrounds it: nearly all of the municipality is cultivated, sugar cane matters in the La Peñuela ejido, and the climate is warm and humid, averaging 22 to 24 °C, with heavy summer rain.