Spanish planned city where serpents shed their skin
Heroica Puebla de Zaragoza—Nahuatl Cuetlaxcoapan, 'where serpents change their skin'—was founded in 1531 between Tlaxcala and other indigenous centers. Mexico's fourth-largest city and metro, about 3.344 million people, began after Bishop Julián Garcés's 1530 letter urging a Spanish settlement on the Mexico–Veracruz road.
Before the Spanish, the valley between Tlaxcala and Cholula was largely empty, reserved for the ritual flower wars in which towns such as Huejotzingo and Tepeaca captured sacrificial victims. Legend says Bishop Garces dreamed of angels marking out streets beside a clear river, which gave the settlement its colonial name, Puebla de los Angeles. The official founding date is 16 April 1531, but floods beside the river drove most settlers from the west bank of the San Francisco to higher ground. The Crown backed it as a town without encomiendas, and a coat of arms followed in 1538, showing a five-towered castle guarded by angels, the initials of Charles V and seven rivers.
Sitting midway between the capital and the port, Puebla quickly became the second city of New Spain. It fed Mexico City with crops, wove textiles and traded north to the silver district of Zacatecas. A cathedral was begun in 1575, by which time the grid covered 120 blocks, and a Portuguese community grew during the union of the two crowns. Composer Juan Gutierrez de Padilla worked at the cathedral from about 1620 to 1664.
After independence, all peninsular Spaniards were expelled in 1827. Winfield Scott's troops occupied the city without a fight in 1847, then endured a month-long siege. On 5 May 1862 Ignacio Zaragoza's army beat the French under Lorencez, and Benito Juarez added his name to the city's; the French took it in 1863 and left in 1866. In November 1910 the Serdan brothers died in a gunfight with federal troops at their house, an early spark of the Revolution.
The state congress granted the title Heroica in 1950, and UNESCO listed the historic centre in 1987. With about 3.3 million people, the metro area ranks fourth in Mexico, and residents look west toward Popocatepetl, which dusted the city with ash as recently as May 2023.
Source: Puebla (city)
