Querétaro

Before the Spanish, the valley was a frontier between the Otomi and the Chichimeca peoples, and older centres such as Toluquilla and Las Ranas had flourished from the Classic period. The Spanish city of Santiago de Querétaro was founded on 25 July 1531, when Hernán Pérez Bocanegra arrived with the Otomi leader Conín, later baptised Hernando de Tapia. According to legend, Saint James appeared in the sky on Sangremal Hill during the struggle for the place. Franciscans, Jesuits, Augustinians, Dominicans and Carmelites followed, building monasteries and colleges, and in 1683 the College for the Propagation of the Faith at Santa Cruz began training missionaries for the north. In the 18th century the Marquis of Urrutia built the aqueduct, and its water reached the city in 1735.

The city was at the centre of the independence conspiracy: in 1810 the plotters met at gatherings hosted by Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, wife of the city's corregidor, in what is now the Palace of the Corregidora. In 1867 Emperor Maximilian made his last stand in the Siege of Querétaro, and he was executed on the Cerro de las Campanas with Generals Miramón and Mejía.

In 1916 President Carranza made Querétaro the provisional capital, and on 5 February 1917 the Constituent Congress meeting in the Teatro de la República enacted the constitution that remains Mexico's law today. The historic centre became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, and from the mid-1990s industrial growth turned the city into one of the fastest-growing in Mexico.

UNESCO singled out the way the old town keeps the geometric street plan of the Spanish side by side with the twisting alleys of the Otomi quarters, and the Otomi heritage remains part of local identity. Querétaro takes pride in its history: the cradle of the independence plot, the place where the Second Empire ended and the birthplace of the modern constitution. La Corregidora, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, is the city's heroine, and her name appears on streets, a square, a stadium and a neighbouring municipality.

Religious life is visible in the many churches and convents and above all in Holy Week, when the eight-day Festival of Santiago de Querétaro fills gardens, museums and theatres with performances and opens with a parade through the centre. Folk legends such as that of La Carambada, re-enacted on the Plaza de Armas, are part of local storytelling.

Sport means football at the Estadio Corregidora, built for the 1986 World Cup, and, since 2024, professional baseball with the Conspiradores de Querétaro, who play in nearby Huimilpan. The city also has two bullrings, Santa María and the small ring at Juriquilla. In 2017 UNESCO named Querétaro a City of Design.

The municipality had about 1,049,800 people in 2020, and the metropolitan area, which takes in Corregidora, El Marqués, Huimilpan and Apaseo el Alto in Guanajuato, about 1.59 million. It is one of the fastest-growing urban areas in Mexico, and most of the growth comes from people moving from Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Guanajuato, Michoacán and Veracruz.

The economy is built on industry and services: aircraft manufacturing and maintenance, car parts and machinery, chemicals, food processing, logistics, call centres and, increasingly, data centres. Many large international companies have their Mexican headquarters here, and the city's output per person is above the Mexican average.

The old town is lived in as well as visited, with families walking in the plazas in the evenings and at weekends. Most residents, though, live outside the old town, in a city that now spreads into the neighbouring municipalities of Corregidora and El Marqués. Rapid growth has put pressure on water supplies, and a second aqueduct was begun in 2010 to relieve the overused aquifer.

The everyday food of the city is the gordita queretana, a round corn cake larger than the usual gordita, filled with cheese and migajas, and enchiladas queretanas, red enchiladas that were once simply called enchiladas rojas. Pozole and both spicy and sweet tamales are also local favourites, along with pan de queso, a cheese bread.

Sweets include dulce de membrillo, a quince paste, jamoncillos, milk fudge, and mantecado ice cream, and atole, a warm corn drink, is widely sold. The Mercado de la Cruz is a market close to the centre, and stalls on the plaza in front of the Santa Cruz church sell gorditas at weekends.

Querétaro state is now Mexico's second wine region after Baja California, and the Spanish producer Freixenet makes wine here. Vineyards around Tequisquiapan make mostly sparkling wines along with reds, whites and rosés, and the area's cheeses come together each year at the National Cheese and Wine Fair in Tequisquiapan.