Guadalajara

The Spanish founded Guadalajara four times. Cristóbal de Oñate, serving under the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán, established the first settlement in 1532 at what is now Nochistlán, in Zacatecas; it moved to a site near Tonalá and then to Tlacotán, and barely survived the Mixtón War of 1540–42, when the Caxcan and other peoples rose against Guzmán's brutality. On 14 February 1542 the town was refounded in the Atemajac Valley, named after Guzmán's home town in Spain. It became the capital of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia in 1560, and silver wealth, trade and the church made it one of the great cities of New Spain; the cathedral was completed in 1618 and a university was established in 1791.

In 1810 Miguel Hidalgo entered the city, set up a revolutionary government and on 6 December decreed the abolition of slavery, before his army was crushed at Calderón Bridge east of the city in January 1811. Guadalajara became the capital of Jalisco in 1823, briefly hosted Benito Juárez's government in the Reform War and was occupied by the French in the 1860s. Electricity and the railway arrived between 1884 and 1890.

The city grew fast in the 20th century, passing a million people in 1964. The Cristero War ended there in 1929. On 22 April 1992 gasoline explosions in the sewers destroyed streets in the Analco district and killed 206 people. Guadalajara has since hosted the 2011 Pan American Games, was UNESCO's World Book Capital in 2022, and hosted matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, as it had in 1970 and 1986.

Guadalajara is the city most strongly associated with mariachi, although the style began in the nearby town of Cocula. The link dates from 1907, when a band and dancers from the city performed for President Porfirio Díaz, and the music later gained attention in Mexico City and came to be recognised as distinctly Mexican. Bands still play for diners in the Plaza de los Mariachis, and the international mariachi and charrería festival, begun in 1994, fills the city in late summer; in 2009 it set a world record when 542 mariachis played together. Charreada, the Mexican rodeo, is popular, and charros parade through the centre each September.

The city is also an intellectual centre. The University of Guadalajara stages the book fair, the largest in the Americas, and the city's film festival is among the most important in Latin America. José Clemente Orozco, born in Jalisco, left some of his greatest murals here, and the architect Luis Barragán and the writer Juan Rulfo are among the artists linked with the city.

Religious life is visible and conservative. Every October huge crowds accompany the image of the Virgin of Zapopan from the cathedral back to her basilica, and on 25 July the Danza de los Tastoanes re-enacts battles against the Spanish. Football divides the city between Chivas, which fields only Mexican players, and Atlas.

About 1.4 million people lived in the municipality of Guadalajara at the 2020 census, and about 5.3 million in the metropolitan area, the third largest in Mexico, which includes Zapopan, Tlaquepaque, Tonalá and Tlajomulco. The municipality itself has been slowly losing people since the early 1990s as growth has moved to the suburbs.

Commerce and services employ most workers, while manufacturing — food and drink, textiles, shoes, auto parts and above all electronics, built up by multinational companies since the mid-1990s — is the engine of the economy, much of it exported to the United States. The city is also a centre for information technology and for universities.

The city has long been divided along social lines: the west, including Providencia, Chapalita and much of Zapopan, is the wealthiest, while the east and parts of the centre are poorer, and new working-class housing spreads across the periphery. Commutes are long, with public-transport riders spending well over an hour a day on average. Lake Chapala, a principal source of the city's water since the 1950s, has shrunk as urban consumption has grown.

The torta ahogada is Guadalajara's own dish: a crusty, salted roll called a birote, filled with pork, refried beans and onions and drowned in a sauce of chile de árbol, or a milder tomato sauce. Birria, meat cooked with spices — goat, beef, lamb or pork — is eaten with a tomato broth or on its own; the old way is to roast it in a pit wrapped in maguey leaves. Carne en su jugo, beef cooked in its broth with beans, bacon, coriander, onion and radish, is another tapatío classic, alongside pozole, the hominy soup, and pipián, a sauce thickened with ground pumpkin seeds.

The city's dessert is the jericalla, a dessert made with milk, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon and sugar. Street drinks include tejuino, a lightly fermented corn drink served with lime juice and a pinch of salt, and tepache, from fermented pineapple.

Tequila comes from the agave country of Jalisco, around the town of Tequila to the north-west and in the Los Altos highlands, and bars offer it as blanco, reposado and añejo. Street vendors, the stalls of the San Juan de Dios market and the bars of Avenida Chapultepec cover most of the eating and drinking, and the city holds an international gastronomy fair each September.