San Juan Teotihuacán

Teotihuacan, a Nahuatl name often glossed as "the birthplace of the gods", was founded around 100 BCE, and at its height in the first half of the first millennium it was the largest city in the Americas, with perhaps 100,000 people. In Nahua mythology the Sun and the Moon were created here. Its major monuments were sacked and burned around AD 550, and the city faded over the following centuries; it predates the Aztec Empire by many centuries.

After the conquest the area was renamed San Juan Teotihuacan, and by the end of the 16th century it was an encomienda of Francisco de Verdugo Bazán. The modern town grew up around the monastery of San Juan Evangelista, founded in 1548; a report of 1580 recorded that most people spoke Nahuatl, with Otomi and Popoloca minorities. During the Revolution rival factions passed through and food grew scarce. Large excavations began in the early 20th century, including Manuel Gamio's work in the 1920s, and in 1987 the ancient city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Development around the site has caused repeated controversy. In the mid-2000s a supermarket built in the Purificación district, in an outer zone of the site where such building was permitted, was opposed by conservationists, intellectuals and artists; it opened in November 2004, 2.4 km from the Pyramid of the Sun. In May 2021 bulldozing for an amusement park on the northern edge of the ruins was halted when federal forces seized the land. In 2008 the Vatican created the Diocese of San Juan Teotihuacan.

The town lives beside one of the most visited archaeological sites in Mexico — the second most visited in 2024, with more than 1.3 million visitors — and its seal shows the Pyramid of the Sun. Research at the site continues to change how the ancient city is understood: a tunnel sealed nearly 2,000 years ago was found beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in 2003, and in October 2025 a partial decipherment of Teotihuacan writing was proposed.

Local religious festivals keep their own calendar. The feast of John the Baptist, the town's patron, falls in late June, and the eight-day feast of Christ the Redeemer in July brings traditional dances, among them the Aztecs, the Santiagueros and the Sembradores, together with the Obsidian Fair, a reminder that obsidian tools from Teotihuacan were once traded across Mesoamerica.

Newer events have joined them since the 2000s. A hot-air balloon festival has been held each year since 2005, drawing around 15,000 people and some twenty balloons, and balloon flights over the pyramids are offered to visitors. The Música para los Dioses rock festival, held since 2006, has brought dozens of bands and crowds of more than 20,000.

The municipality covers about 83 square kilometres and includes the town and some 115 other named communities; a little under half of its people live in the town itself. Despite the site's fame, agriculture employs the largest share of residents, about 48 per cent, followed by commerce and tourism together at about 32 per cent and a small industry processing food, drinks and other farm products. The countryside is semi-arid, with cactus, maguey and grasses on the dry ground and two rivers, the San Juan and the San Lorenzo, running through the town.

Tourism has not created a large industry. Few hotels stand near the site, and most people who earn a living from visitors sell souvenirs inside and outside its gates, in businesses that have grown up haphazardly. The supermarket that caused such controversy became an economic engine for the town, drawing shoppers from the surrounding area. Land around the ruins remains contested between development and protection.

Monday is market day, when hundreds of stalls fill the streets between the site and the old monastery, and the area is quiet again once the day visitors leave in the late afternoon.

The food here is that of the farming country of the northern Valley of Mexico. Barbacoa, slow-cooked meat, and mixiote, meat steamed in a wrapper, are the dishes to look for, along with quail and many preparations of nopal, the prickly-pear cactus pad, which grows abundantly in the area.

The best places to find them are the permanent municipal market, which dates from the early 20th century, and the Monday tianguis, one of the most traditional in the Valley of Mexico, where most of the merchandise is food and prepared dishes. The tianguis is also known for its fruit and vegetables. The market was the scene of archaeological work in 2005, when new drains were laid inside the site's protected perimeter.

Around the ruins, restaurants cater to visitors arriving from Mexico City. The maguey that grows on the dry hillsides around the town is the plant from which pulque, the fermented drink of the region, is made.