Veracruz

The Spanish captain Juan de Grijalva landed in 1518 on the island he named San Juan de Ulúa, then a sanctuary of the god Tezcatlipoca. On Good Friday, 22 April 1519, Hernán Cortés came ashore opposite it and founded Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the "rich town of the True Cross", setting up a council that is counted as the first city council on the American mainland; in 1523 it became the first mainland settlement to receive a European coat of arms. The town moved in 1525 to La Antigua, and in 1600 the Crown ordered it back to its first site to curb smuggling.

As the gateway of New Spain, Veracruz shipped silver and gold to Spain and received the twice-yearly treasure fleets, and its merchants were at times wealthier than those of Mexico City. Enslaved Africans were brought in through the port. Its wealth drew pirates — Laurens de Graaf and his allies attacked it in 1683 — and the city was walled, with Ulúa built up as its fortress.

After independence, Spanish troops held Ulúa until 1825 and bombarded the city. The French attacked in the Pastry War, US forces under Winfield Scott besieged and took the city in 1847, Benito Juárez governed from here during the civil war of 1857, and French troops occupied it in the 1860s. The United States occupied the port again from April to November 1914. Its defences earned it four titles of "Heroic City". Porfirio Díaz modernised the port, its powerful unions were reorganised by 1991, and it is now Mexico's main commercial port.

Veracruz has always been a meeting point of cultures — Spanish, Indigenous and African, joined after independence by immigrants from Italy and Cuba — and that mix shows above all in its music and food. Son jarocho, the traditional music of the state, is closely associated with the city; "La Bamba", made famous by Ritchie Valens, has its roots in the son of southern Veracruz. The faster, flashier son comercial, developed in the 1940s, accompanies folk dance shows in which women in long white dresses dance with fans, and son singers can be heard on the Zócalo almost any time.

The danzón, brought from Cuba by refugees in the 1870s, was once a dance of the poor and is now danced by couples of all classes on the Zócalo on most evenings, kept alive by dance schools. The city's most famous son is the songwriter Agustín Lara, author of "María Bonita", whose house in Boca del Río is a museum.

Carnival has been held every year since 1866 and is the largest in the country, opening with the Burning of Bad Humour and closing with the Burial of Juan Carnaval. The Zócalo is busy from morning to night with music and dancing, and the naval academy, founded here in 1897, gave it a long naval tradition. Baseball and football are the most popular sports; El Águila de Veracruz plays in the Mexican Baseball League, while the old football club, the Tiburones Rojos, was disaffiliated in 2019.

The 2020 census counted about 538,000 people in the city of Veracruz, including the part that spreads into Boca del Río, and about 607,000 in the municipality. The port is the economy's engine: in the 20th century oil mattered most to the state, but the port has since re-emerged as the main source of work and is the principal gateway for Mexico's imports and exports, above all for the car industry. Factories in and around the city make paints, food products, plastics, petrochemicals and metals.

Automation of the docks under federal control cut 80 per cent of port jobs and brought strikes. Boca del Río, at the southern end, holds the business hotels, newer towers and upscale restaurants. Beyond the city the municipality grows maize, beans, fruit and sugar cane and raises cattle.

The day starts early in the coffee houses, where conversation over a lechero is a central part of social life. Evenings belong to the malecón, where people stroll and exercise in the sea breeze, and to the Zócalo, busy until late with music, dominoes and dancing. The wet season's afternoon storms and the winter nortes shape the year.

Veracruz cooking joins indigenous staples — maize, beans, squash, chillies, tomatoes, avocados and tropical fruit such as mamey and sapote — with ingredients brought by the Spanish through the port: olive oil, garlic, capers, olives, almonds, rice and herbs such as parsley, thyme and bay. The signature dish, huachinango a la veracruzana, is red snapper cooked with tomatoes, chillies, olive oil, garlic and capers. Arroz a la tumbada is rice baked with a variety of seafood, and caldo de mariscos, a seafood soup, is reputed to cure hangovers.

Coffee houses are the heart of the city's social life, and the Gran Café del Portal and the Café de la Parroquia are the best known. Coffee comes as a lechero, espresso topped up with milk in a glass, and customers ask for more by clinking their spoons against the glass — a custom said to go back to a trolley driver who rang his bell as he approached the café, and to the regulars who tapped their glasses as his funeral passed.

For everyday food, locals eat at the lunch counters of Mercado Hidalgo, among the stalls of fish and seafood, and the restaurants of Boca del Río serve the Gulf's catch to a smarter crowd.