Huasca de Ocampo

Huasca lies where the Sierra de Pachuca meets the western end of the Tulancingo valley. Augustinians from the monastery at Atotonilco el Grande founded its parish church in the first half of the 16th century, and one of the first haciendas established in Mexico, a farming and livestock estate, was founded here. By the 17th century the encomienda had been broken up and the lands around the Indigenous town became haciendas.

The town's great period came in the 18th century with Pedro Romero de Terreros. His mines here and in Pachuca and Real del Monte made him the richest man in the world at the time, and he built four mining haciendas in the valley to process the ore, at a cost of two million pesos; one of them employed up to 2,000 workers, and he died at his residence here in 1781. Alexander von Humboldt visited in 1803 and sketched the basalt prisms that were then part of the estate. By 1810 the output of the mines had fallen by almost 80 per cent, and agriculture became the mainstay.

In the 20th century the haciendas were broken up into ejidos, land held in common by rural communities, and dams built to store water and generate electricity for Pachuca flooded parts of them, leaving one almost entirely under water. Several of the old buildings became hotels, and the area's haciendas and landscapes have served as sets for films such as The Mask of Zorro. In 2001 Huasca became the first town in Hidalgo to join the federal Pueblos Mágicos programme, chosen because its old buildings survive and its pace of life has changed little.

Huasca's appeal lies in its preserved small-town character: houses of white sandstone with pitched roofs of red tile or laminate, a parish church at the centre, and a pace of life that has changed little since the early 20th century. Many people assume the church is dedicated to the Archangel Michael, because of the carving above its main door, but its patron is John the Baptist, whose feast on 24 June is the town's main festival.

The town is known for its pottery made with local red clay, sold in workshops under the portals north of the church, and for other crafts: hats, molcajete grinding bowls carved from volcanic stone, furniture, wrought iron and obsidian objects. The Casa de Cultura, south of the church, also sells local work.

Local legend has a playful place too. The Museo de los Duendes, just outside town, collects stories of goblins and similar creatures from around the world, inspired by a tale that a group of friends camping nearby in 1994 met goblins who were angry at mankind's destruction of nature. Few people in the municipality now speak an Indigenous language — 64 in the 2005 census.

The municipality had 17,607 people at the 2020 census, and only a small share of them live in the town itself; most live in villages spread across the valley. Agriculture is still important, employing over 37 per cent of the population, with manufacturing, construction and mining employing about 28 per cent and commerce, including tourism, about 35 per cent. Local products include processed foods, drinks and animal feed.

The landscape shapes daily life. About 3,300 hectares of forest cover the Sierra de Pachuca around the town, and rivers and streams feed 87 natural and dammed bodies of water, the best known being the San Antonio Regla dam, whose water mainly irrigates farms. Ejidos run trout farms, parks and other attractions on their communal land.

State and local authorities have promoted tourism, and Huasca fills with visitors from Mexico City at weekends. That popularity has brought property disputes between residents and outsiders seeking to buy or control land, especially around the old haciendas. On weekdays the town is quiet, and life turns on farming, the market and the church.

Huasca's food is that of the Hidalgo highlands. Trout is the local speciality, raised in farms on ejido land and in the valley's cold streams and lakes; small rustic restaurants at the farms prepare it in various ways, baked among them, and at some visitors can catch their own fish before it is cooked.

At the market and in the town's restaurants the regional dishes appear too: barbacoa, meat slow-cooked in a pit; cecina, thin salted and dried beef; quesadillas filled with huitlacoche, the corn fungus prized as a delicacy; and pastes, the pasties introduced by Cornish miners at nearby Real del Monte and Pachuca and now a Hidalgo staple.

Sweet things and drinks round out the list. Pulque bread, made with the fermented sap of the maguey, is sold in town, along with local fruit wines and rompope, an eggnog-like drink. The region's pulque, the milky drink from which the bread takes its name, is still made in Hidalgo.