Tepeapulco

Tepeapulco is a quiet town on the pulque plains southeast of Zempoala, and one of the first places in Hidalgo the Spanish reached. Franciscan friars arrived in the late 1520s and built the Convent of San Francisco, one of the oldest in the region. Its most famous resident was Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who lived here from about 1558 to 1560 and interviewed local elders for the work that became his General History of the Things of New Spain, a key source on Aztec life.

Next to the convent stands the Caja de Agua, a fountain the friars built in 1545 to supply the town, where water still spills from carved stone lions into the old washing basins. It is one of the most charming small colonial monuments in the state.

Three kilometers north, at the foot of Cerro Xihuingo, lies the archaeological zone of the same name, a Teotihuacan-era settlement on the trade route to the Gulf coast. Its cliffs are covered with petroglyphs, including dotted crosses believed to have been used to track the calendar, and a stepped pyramid called El Tecolote.