Chichicastenango

Before the Spanish conquest the town was a K'iche' Maya ceremonial and regional centre, known by its K'iche' name, Chaviar. The Spanish renamed it Tzitzicaztenanco, "place of nettles", using the Nahuatl language of the Tlaxcalan soldiers who came with Pedro de Alvarado's army in the 1520s, and Dominican friars made it one of their doctrinas, settlements where the K'iche' were taught the Catholic faith. The church of Santo Tomás was raised on a pre-Columbian temple platform, and the town took the apostle as its patron.

The town's most famous moment came between 1701 and 1703, when the friar Francisco Ximénez served as its parish priest. In the convent he found a K'iche' manuscript of the Popol Vuh, the sacred narrative of the K'iche' people, written down around 1550, and he transcribed and translated it into Spanish, preserving the Maya creation story and the tale of the Hero Twins.

After independence Chichicastenango passed between several administrative divisions, and on 13 September 1948 it was raised to the rank of villa and confirmed as a municipality of El Quiché. In the 1950s members of Catholic Action badly damaged the stone image of Pascual Abaj, but it is still venerated. From the 1930s the town drew film-makers: The New Adventures of Tarzan was partly filmed here in 1935, and a colour travelogue, Sacred City of the Mayans, followed in 1936. Today its market is one of the best known in the Guatemalan highlands.

Chichicastenango is a K'iche' Maya cultural centre. According to the 2012 census, 98.5 per cent of the municipality's people are K'iche'; about a fifth speak only K'iche', most speak both K'iche' and Spanish, and a small minority speak only Spanish. Women's huipil blouses, woven on the backstrap loom, carry patterns tied to lineage and to the Maya view of the cosmos.

Religion joins two traditions. K'iche' priests use the church of Santo Tomás for their own rituals, burning incense and candles, and each of the steps leading up to it is said to stand for one month of the Maya calendar year. Ceremonies are also held on the hill of Turkaj, where Pascual Abaj stands. The town has fourteen cofradías, religious brotherhoods, each of which keeps the image of a saint on an altar in the home of its senior mayordomo and carries it to the church at festival time.

The fiesta of Santo Tomás, with its main day on 21 December, is one of the largest celebrations in Guatemala. Each dance group holds its own ceremonies and rehearsals with marimba music, and the groups perform the dances of the bulls, the deer, the conquest, the Moors, the snake and the palo volador, in which men swing from a tall pole, while the cofradías process with the saints and fireworks fill the evenings. The masks worn in these dances are made in the town and sold in the market.

The municipality takes in the town and dozens of rural communities around it. Farming is one mainstay: the main crops are maize, beans, wheat and fruit, especially apples and peaches. The municipality covers about 400 square kilometres of hills, with woods of pine, oak and cypress alongside orchards of apples, pears and peaches.

Crafts are the other mainstay. Families weave textiles on the backstrap loom and make bags, hammocks, clothing, wooden masks and furniture, musical instruments, palm baskets and hats, leather goods, candles and fireworks, and these are sold at the market, which also draws traders from neighbouring towns and regions.

The week turns on Thursday and Sunday. Traders arrive early with produce, flowers, livestock and goods for the stalls, which spread through the streets around the plaza until the late afternoon, while tour groups arrive later by bus. On other days the town is quieter, and life follows the fields, the church and the cofradías.

Food here is highland Maya cooking at its simplest: hand-patted maize tortillas with every meal, black beans, eggs, fresh cheese and chillies, with tamales and chuchitos, small tamales steamed in maize husks or leaves, for weekends and celebrations. Pepián, a stew thickened with toasted seeds and chillies, is the dish of fiestas.

The market is the place to eat as well as to shop. Comedores serve simple set meals, and stalls sell atol, a warm and often sweetened maize drink, and pan dulce, sweet bread. Besides the cooked food, the market sells cal, the lime used to prepare maize for tortillas, along with grindstones, condiments and the season's fruit from the hills around the town.

During the fiesta, dance groups pay their own expenses by selling chicha, a fermented drink, and cheap cane spirit, aguardiente, is widely drunk in the highlands. Around the plaza, restaurants, one of them in an old colonial building, add grilled meats and fuller Guatemalan menus for visitors.