Puebla (city)

• 1. Introduction

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  Puebla de Zaragoza sits about 100 kilometers east southeast of Mexico City, on the old road that linked the capital to the Atlantic port of Veracruz. According to legend, a bishop named Julián Garcés dreamed of this place before it existed. In his dream he saw a valley of woods and meadows, crossed by a clear river and dotted with fresh-water springs. Then a group of angels descended from heaven and traced out a city. He woke convinced he had seen a divine vision, and he went looking for the spot. That dream gave Puebla its first name, Puebla de los Ángeles, and its nickname, Angelópolis, the City of Angels. The valley the bishop chose carried a darker history before the Spanish arrived. It was once a battleground, set aside for ritual wars among rival peoples. Why did the Spanish Crown want a city built here, on land that held no existing indigenous city-state? How did a planned colonial town become the fourth-largest city in Mexico, home to the world's largest Volkswagen factory outside Germany? And how did a kidnapped girl from India, an old turkey in a convent kitchen, and a fountain shaped like a candy become woven into its story? The answers begin in a valley called Cuetlaxcoapan, where serpents change their skin.

• 2. A City Born From A Letter

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  In 1530, the bishop of Tlaxcala, Julián Garcés, wrote to the Spanish queen. He argued for a Spanish settlement midway between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz. The valley he had in mind was called Cuetlaxcoapan, a name meaning "where serpents change their skin." Before the Spanish came, this land was not a town. In the 15th century it had been set aside for the so-called Flower wars, ritual battles among the populations of Itzocan, Tepeaca, Huejotzingo, Texmelucan and Tlaxcala. Soldiers captured in these wars were used as sacrifice victims. The official foundation date is the 16th of April 1531. The city was deliberately built as a Spanish town, not on top of an existing indigenous city-state. That first attempt failed. The chosen site sat right next to a river and flooded constantly. Several rivers run through the Valley of Puebla, the San Francisco, the Atoyac and the Alseseca. Most of the early settlers abandoned the west bank of the San Francisco River for higher ground. A few families stayed behind and renamed the original spot Alto de San Francisco. The Spanish Crown had a particular reason for backing this city. It was founded without encomiendas, the system that granted settlers control over indigenous labor. That system was being abused, and many Spaniards had ended up landless. Puebla offered them a place to start. The coat of arms it received in 1538 tells the founding story in symbols, a castle with five towers protected by angels, and below it seven rivers crossing the city.

• 3. The Second City Of New Spain

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  Puebla quickly became the second most important city in New Spain. Its favorable climate and its position between the main port and the capital fed its rise. It supplied Mexico City with commercially grown crops and grew into a center of textile production. It was also well connected to the silver-mining region around Zacatecas to the north. The city wore its loyalty as a series of titles. It was named "Noble y Leal," Noble and Loyal, in 1558, then "Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad" in 1561, and "Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad" in 1576. The street plan followed classic Spanish design, centered on a main plaza now called the Zócalo. That plaza began as a rectangle, then was made square because the rectangular version was thought ugly. By the end of the 16th century the city covered 120 blocks, much of it still under construction. The new Cathedral was begun in 1575. During the Union of Spain and Portugal, between 1580 and 1640, Puebla developed a sizeable Portuguese community. Those trade ties and a growing economy turned the city into an entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade in the early 1600s. Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, the preeminent 17th-century composer in the New World, spent most of his life at the cathedral, from about 1620 to 1664. The city council, made up only of Spaniards, governed with real autonomy. By 1786, the lands under Puebla's jurisdiction stretched from what is now Veracruz to Guerrero.

• 4. Sieges And A Famous Victory

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  In 1847, United States forces under General Winfield Scott took Puebla without a shot fired. The American garrison was then besieged in the city from the 14th of September to the 12th of October 1847 by the irregular forces of General Joaquín Rea, later reinforced by Antonio López de Santa Anna. The siege broke when General Joseph Lane fought his way in from Veracruz, after defeating Santa Anna at the Battle of Huamantla on the 9th of October 1847. American forces left in July 1848 once the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified. The city's most famous day came on the 5th of May 1862, during the French intervention in Mexico. At the Battle of Puebla, Mexican forces under Ignacio Zaragoza defeated the French army under Count de Lorencez. That same year Benito Juárez issued a decree changing the city's name to Puebla de Zaragoza. The holiday "5 de Mayo," Cinco de Mayo, remains a major annual event here. The French returned in 1863 and succeeded in taking the city. They left in 1866, and reconstruction began in 1867. Decades later, Puebla helped set off the Mexican Revolution. The siblings Carmen, Máximo and Aquiles Serdán organized one of the first conspiracies against the government of Porfirio Díaz. Their plans were discovered, and federal troops surrounded their house on 6 Oriente street. In the gun battle that followed, both Serdán brothers were killed on the 18th of November 1910. Every the 5th of May the city stages a large parade and a re-enactment of the 1862 battle, with soldiers in period uniform and the Mexican Army's tanks and armored vehicles on display.

• 5. Cradle Of Mexican Baroque

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  Over 5,000 buildings fill the catalogue of Puebla's historic center, in styles from Baroque to Renaissance to Classic. UNESCO declared that center a World Heritage Site in 1987 and also recognizes Puebla as a "Design City." The city is called the "cradle of Mexican Baroque," in architecture and in the decorative arts alike, and counts among the five most important colonial cities in Mexico. Its churches and mansions are built mostly in gray cantera stone and red brick, decorated with multicolored tiles. Puebla Cathedral, on 16 de Septiembre and 5 Oriente, took 300 years to complete. It was begun in 1575 under orders of Philip II of Spain by architects Francisco Becerra and Juan de Cigorondo. The building was consecrated in 1649, even though half its walls and much of the roof were still missing and the towers not yet built. The north tower was added in 1678 and the south tower in 1768. Its bell towers stand at just under 70 meters, the tallest in Mexico. The main cupola and main altar were both decorated by Cristóbal de Villalpando, and the two organs were donated by Charles V. Inside the Church of Santo Domingo lies the Chapel of the Rosary, built between 1650 and 1690 and the first dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary. Its cupola is shaped like the crown of the Virgin Mary, and it holds six paintings by José Rodríguez Carnero. The oldest noble house in the city, the Casa del Deán, was finished in 1580 by Tomás de la Plaza Goes. In 1953 it was nearly demolished for a movie theater. Protests saved only part of it, preserving frescos that are the only surviving non-religious examples from the 16th century still in their original place in Mexico.

• 6. Convents, Pirates And A Library

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  The Biblioteca Palafoxiana was established in 1646 by Juan de Palafox y Mendoza for the Seminary of Puebla. He donated his own collection of 5,000 books to the College of San Juan to begin it. It was the first public library in the Americas. Today it holds over 42,000 books and 5,000 manuscripts, dating from 1473 to 1910, and UNESCO has named it a world heritage site. Many of Puebla's museums began as something else entirely. The Amparo Museum occupies two colonial buildings once known as El Hospitalito. One was the Hospital of San Juan de Letrán; the other became the "Deposito de Mujeres Casadas," a refuge established in 1606 for women whose husbands were away for long periods. The idea proved unpopular, and in 1609 it turned into an asylum for "lost women." The Centro Cultural Santa Rosa sits in a 17th-century building that once housed Dominican nuns. After 1869 it became a psychiatric hospital, and later its rooms held tenements for about 1,500 people. One of the city's strangest stories belongs to a woman named Mirra. According to colonial-era sources, she was a young Indian woman kidnapped by Portuguese pirates and taken to Cochin, in southern India. She escaped to a Jesuit mission, was baptized Catarina de San Juan, then was kidnapped again and eventually sold in Acapulco to a Puebla merchant named Miguel de Sosa. Through her life she kept dressing in a sari, which may have given rise to the "china dress" that grew popular in Mexico in the 17th century. The "China Poblana" died on the 5th of January 1688 at the age of 82. She was venerated as a saint until 1691, when the Mexican Inquisition prohibited open devotion to her. Her remains lie in the sacristy of the Templo de la Compañía, known as La Tumba de la China Poblana.

• 7. Mole, Walnuts And Tiles

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  Mole poblano, the best-known mole, is named for the city, and its origin is disputed. One legend places it in the Convent of Santa Rosa, where 16th-century nuns learned an archbishop was coming to visit and had nothing to serve but an old turkey. As the story goes, they mixed together whatever they had, different chili peppers, day-old bread, chocolate and roughly twenty other ingredients, simmered it for hours, and poured it over the turkey. The archbishop was pleased. The other version claims the sauce dates to pre-Hispanic times and was served to Hernán Cortés by Moctezuma II. The Aztecs did make a preparation called "chilmulli," Nahuatl for "chili pepper sauce," but there is no evidence chocolate ever flavored it. Chiles en nogada was also supposedly invented here. Three sisters from Puebla fell in love with officers from Agustín de Iturbide's Army of the Three Guarantees, but none of them knew how to cook. Their mother sent them to the Convent of Santa Mónica to learn, and they created a dish in the colors of the Mexican flag, green parsley, white walnut sauce and red pomegranate seeds. It was served for the first time at a banquet for Iturbide. The city is equally known for Talavera pottery. Between 1550 and 1570, Spanish potters from Talavera de la Reina came to teach the potter's wheel and tin-glazing, methods mixed with native designs to create Poblano Talavera. The years between 1650 and 1750 were its Golden Age. Then in 1813 the constitution eradicated the potter's guild and revoked the quality ordinances of 1653. Technique declined and the market crashed. Of 46 workshops, only seven remained. When Enrique Luis Ventosa, a 29-year-old Catalan, arrived in 1897, just six were left. He became the leading force behind a revival of the craft.

• 8. Factories And Universities

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  Industry accounts for about eighty percent of Puebla's economy. Its main products include basic metals, chemicals, electrical items and textiles, and its largest employers are Hylsa and the Volkswagen automotive plant. The metropolitan area holds the world's largest Volkswagen factory outside Germany, in the Municipality of Cuautlancingo, along with an Audi plant in San José Chiapa. Many suppliers to those assembly lines have opened factories nearby. The current population stands at 3,344,000 people, making Puebla the fourth-largest city in Mexico, after Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara. It draws students from surrounding states to universities such as BUAP, UDLAP and Ibero. The Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, the oldest and largest university in the region, was founded on the 15th of April 1587. The city ranks second only to Mexico City in its number of universities. The biggest football stadium here, Cuauhtémoc Stadium, was built in 1968 as a second field for the 1968 Olympic Games and seats 51,720. It hosted matches for both the 1970 and 1986 FIFA World Cups. Beneath all of this runs a mystery only recently confirmed. For years the tunnels under the city were dismissed as an urban legend, until they were rediscovered in 2015. They are believed to be up to 500 years old and thought to extend for more than 10 kilometers, a hidden layer of the city the bishop once saw only in a dream.