Travel Guide Puebla

The Nahuatl name of the city where Puebla de Los Angeles was established in 1531 was Cuetlaxcoapan, which means "place where vipers moult". Surrounded by three volcanoes ( Popocatépetl,Iztaccíhuatl and Malinche), it is located at an altitude of 2,160 m, which gives it a temperate climate under the Tropic of Cancer. It is a very Spanish city, bourgeois and conservative, by its architecture as by its atmosphere. The city of a hundred steeples is, however, a little disturbed by a university with a protesting tendency. With the installation of the Volkswagen factory in 1964 (the second largest factory in the world after Wolfsburg), the city of Puebla has become an important industrial centre, and today has a little more than one and a half million inhabitants. The city centre comes alive especially at weekends, when the antique shops overflow their stalls into the squares and alleys. The whole city also seems to come alive during the celebrations of the Battle of Puebla. It is indeed here that Mexican nationalism took root: this battle marks the first victory of a Mexican general against a foreign army, in this case the French army (May 5, 1862); never mind that this victory was temporary and ultimately anecdotal (the French army won the war and Maximilian of Habsburg was named Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III two years later), this date is celebrated throughout the country with more exuberance than Independence, and gives rise to cultural and artistic festivities of international quality all over the city.