Perote

Perote is a town and municipal seat on the high plateau in the west of central Veracruz, at about 2,400 metres, on the edge of the state of Puebla and at the northern foot of the Cofre de Perote volcano. It lies on federal highway 140, about 50 km by road west of Xalapa. The town had 42,451 people at the 2020 census and the municipality 77,432. Perote is the only part of Veracruz on the Mexican altiplano, and its climate is unlike the rest of the state: semi-dry and temperate, with an annual average of about 12 °C, frequent frosts and very little rain, most of it from July to September.

In pre-Hispanic times there was a village here called Pinahuizapan. Its Spanish name goes back to an inn on the Camino Real between Veracruz and Mexico City: in 1520 a license was granted for a roadside inn at Pinahuizapan, and in 1527 a tall soldier named Pedro de Anzures, nicknamed Pedrote, ran the inn around which the settlement grew. After the British took Havana in 1762, the colonial government built the Fortaleza de San Carlos on the plain north of the town to guard the road inland; finished in 1776–77, it later held the first Colegio Militar, Texan prisoners in the 1830s and, during the Second World War, citizens of Axis countries. Mexico's first president, Guadalupe Victoria, died there on 21 March 1843. It was a state prison from 1949 until 2007, and has since been opened to visitors. Perote was raised to city status on 2 October 1973.

The town is known for its cured meats: a Spanish community that settled here in the 1930s brought serrano ham, botifarra and chorizo, and local workshops still make carnes frías and embutidos, along with cheese cocoles. Farming on the plain produces potatoes, maize, wheat, barley and broad beans. The Cofre de Perote, at about 4,200 metres the second-highest peak in Veracruz, has been a national park since 1937 and can be approached from the village of El Conejo. Main fiestas are the Santa Cruz on 3 May, the town's founding anniversary on 20 June, and San Miguel Arcángel, patron of the main church, on 29 September.