Todos Santos Cuchumatán

The Mam Maya held these mountains long before the Spanish arrived, with their capital at Zaculeu near today's Huehuetenango. In 1525, after a siege of several months, Zaculeu fell to the conquistadors, and the Spanish took control of the region. The Mam were gathered into new settlements under encomiendas, grants of Indigenous labour to Spanish settlers, and Todos Santos was named for All Saints. Mercedarian friars ran its parish until 1754, when Bourbon reforms passed it to the secular clergy. In 1797 the town had 827 inhabitants, who raised sheep and sold wool.

After independence the town belonged in turn to various administrative districts, and in 1838–40 to the short-lived State of Los Altos, before becoming part of the department of Huehuetenango. The writer Maud Oakes wrote about the town in her books The Two Crosses of Todos Santos and Beyond the Windy Place.

Like much of the western highlands, the area has seen heavy emigration to the United States. In May 2000 a mob attacked a group of Japanese tourists and their Guatemalan bus driver after members of the group photographed local children, and the driver and one tourist were killed. Persistent rumours of child abduction still make residents protective of their families.

Todos Santos is one of the few places in Guatemala where Maya men as well as women still wear traditional clothing every day. The dress is kept in full: parents teach their children to wear it from birth, and it marks the town out with pride from the rest of the country, although women have been modernising some details of their dress. Shops in the town sell the clothing to visitors.

Mam, a Maya language spoken by around half a million people across western Guatemala and Chiapas in Mexico, is most people's first language, and Spanish is widely spoken as a second. People are relaxed and often happy to chat, but guard their privacy, and the request to ask before taking a photograph is meant seriously.

The great event of the year is the festival from 31 October to 2 November, centred on All Saints' Day. There are traditional dances and marimba music, and on 1 November the horse race, Skach Koyl in Mam. Riders in feathers, ribbons on their hats and red sashes and scarves gallop back and forth along a track of about a hundred metres all day. The race's origin is uncertain; one explanation is that it celebrates Mam who seized horses and escaped from the Spanish. The riders traditionally drink for days beforehand, and the race is often chaotic and sometimes bloody, even though the mayor banned the sale of hard alcohol in 2008.

The municipality covers about 269 square kilometres, with the town, six villages and 69 smaller rural communities, and its population was projected at about 40,000 in 2022, most of them Mam. The village of San Martín Cuchumatán, lower and warmer at about 1,800 metres, is the second centre and the agricultural heart of the valley.

Almost everyone lives from farming, with crops set by altitude. Potatoes are the most important, along with cabbage, cauliflower, carrots and maize; up to about 2,000 metres the traditional milpa of maize, beans and squash and coffee grow on the slopes, and broccoli is now grown on a large scale for export to the United States. On the cold limestone plateau above 3,000 metres, people live scattered among flocks of sheep and herds of cows and travel on horseback.

Farming fills most people's days, and across the highlands money sent home by relatives working in the United States pays for many of the new concrete houses.

Food in Todos Santos is the plain fare of the cold highlands. Maize, beans and chillies are the base of traditional Guatemalan cooking, and potatoes are the municipality's most important crop. Tamales come in hundreds of varieties across Guatemala; chuchitos, which resemble Mexican tamales, are wrapped in maize husks, and pepián, a thick meat stew thickened with gourd seeds, is considered a national dish.

The surrounding fields fill the market with potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers and carrots, and coffee is grown on the lower slopes of the municipality. Atol, a hot maize drink common across Guatemala, is welcome on cold mornings, and visitors eat in simple comedores in the centre. Further down the valley, in warmer San Martín, the slopes grow coffee, the traditional milpa of maize, beans and squash, and broccoli for export. At festival time the riders drink heavily for days, despite the 2008 ban on selling hard alcohol.