Cuernavaca

People lived around Gualupita, in the north of today's city, by about 1000 BCE. From at least the 12th century the Tlahuica, a Nahua people, had their main settlement here, called Cuauhnāhuac, "near the trees". The town later paid tribute to the Aztecs, and its mild climate drew Aztec rulers. In April 1521, on their way to Tenochtitlan, Spanish troops under Gonzalo de Sandoval, joined by Hernán Cortés, crossed the Amanalco ravine, sacked and burned the town, and celebrated the first mass in Morelos at nearby Acapantzingo.

Cortés made the place his own. He built a fortified palace over a Tlahuica tribute house, finished in 1535, founded the church of San José at Tlaltenango and established one of the first sugar plantations in Mexico, at Atlacomulco. Franciscans raised the monastery of La Asunción, its church built to double as a fortress; it became a cathedral in 1891. In the 18th century the Taxco silver magnate José de la Borda bought a house whose grounds his son turned into a botanical garden, and in 1865 Emperor Maximilian and Carlota made it their summer home.

A railway to Mexico City arrived in 1877. During the Revolution Emiliano Zapata besieged and took the city in 1914 and lost it in 1916. The US ambassador Dwight Morrow kept a weekend house here and in 1929 paid for Diego Rivera's murals in the Palace of Cortés. Mexico City residents moved south in growing numbers from the 1980s, and the 1985 earthquake pushed more to settle. The earthquake of 19 September 2017 killed four people in the city and damaged the palace and the cathedral; the palace reopened as a museum in 2023.

The city's identity rests on its climate. Alexander von Humboldt wrote of the region's "perpetual spring", and Cuernavaca is still called the City of Eternal Spring. Since Aztec times its warmth and gardens have attracted rulers and the wealthy, and in the 20th century they attracted writers and foreigners: Malcolm Lowry set his novel Under the Volcano here, and after a Catholic study centre closed in 1969 its teachers stayed on, making Cuernavaca a leading centre for teaching Spanish to foreigners. Language students and a large foreign resident population remain part of the city's life.

Art has a strong place. Rivera's murals of the conquest and revolution in Morelos fill the Palace of Cortés; the Robert Brady Museum keeps an American artist's collection in an old monastery tower; the Juan Soriano museum, opened in 2018, shows contemporary art; and smaller museums cover popular arts, the city's history and old photographs.

The calendar is busy with festivals. The carnival before Lent features the chinelos, dancers in bearded masks and plumed hats whose leaping dance is a Morelos tradition, also famous in Tepoztlán. In early May the flower fair fills the Borda Garden with growers from across Mexico, and the old villages now inside the city keep their own patron-saint feasts, such as that of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Tlaltenango in September.

The city had 341,029 inhabitants at the 2020 census, and the metropolitan area, which takes in Jiutepec, Temixco, Emiliano Zapata, Xochitepec, Tepoztlán, Tlaltizapán and Huitzilac, had 1,028,589. The metropolitan area has grown fast since the 1960s and is increasingly tied to Greater Mexico City: many families keep weekend homes here, and some residents commute daily to the capital.

Most of the municipality's economy is retail and services, and about two-thirds of its workers are employed in sectors that depend on tourism. Plant nurseries on the outskirts grow and ship plants, flowers and seeds, and the city has a long tradition of schools teaching Spanish to foreigners. Housing takes up most of the city's land, much of it in middle-class developments such as Rancho Cortés and Rancho Tetela on the outskirts.

The city is cut by deep wooded ravines, the barrancas, which help regulate its climate, and the municipality was declared a forest protection zone in 1937 to protect its aquifers and vegetation. The influx of residents from the capital has put pressure on the city's infrastructure. Weekends are noticeably busier as visitors arrive from the capital.

Pozole is the dish locals point to: a broth of hominy corn and meat, and in Cuernavaca often green, made with pipián sauce, a version served a block from the cathedral. Tacos are everywhere, and taco stands often offer arrachera, skirt steak, a thicker cut than the usual bistec, and the set comida corrida — soup, a small pasta dish, a main course and dessert, with a drink — is the usual weekday lunch.

Around the zócalo vendors sell corn on the cob, snow cones, sweets and fruit smoothies, and the Adolfo López Mateos market east of the centre is the place for produce and cooked food. The surrounding state adds its own specialities: cecina, thin salted and dried beef, from Yecapixtla, and the ice creams of Tepoztlán, made in many unusual flavours. The old villages inside the city keep their own festival food: the feast in Ocotepec is known for mole and pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, served alongside the dance of the Moors and Christians.