Puebla Tehuacán

As legend goes, the city of Puebla is of divine origin. According to the legend, angels were sent by god to the site where the city was to be built and the angels mapped out where the streets would be with twine. Puebla was founded on April 16th, 1531 and given the name "Puebla de Los Angeles" or "La Angelopoulis". Puebla was the first city in central Mexico founded by Spanish conquerors that was not built upon the ruins of a conquered American Indian settlement and was the only city in New Spain conceived as a "republic of Spanish farmers".

Because of Puebla's strategic location halfway between the port of Veracruz and Mexico city it was a reliable place to rest on the tiring and risky main trade route, this made Puebla the second most important city during the colonial period. Puebla soon grew in its original purpose to be a city that was not made up by a specific nationality of people, as eventually the indigenous had to be given their own land to be tilled and built upon because they were the areas first inhabitants. So Puebla rose from being a modest village built by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, to a city with both privileged and poorer classes living together and now having clear social divisions.

The advantageous location of the city of Puebla and possibly having the additional manpower of its indigenous neighbors, Tlaxcala, Cholula, Huejotzingo and Calpan, as well as the quality of the natural resources of the region gave rise to a vigorous economy. It was only natural that the city of Puebla came to be viewed as the second New Spain, culture and the arts blossomed with great splendor. Being driven primarily by the Church, important events were usually enshrined in the temples, monasteries and religious schools proliferated throughout the city.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a considerable number of European immigrants came to the city, mainly from Germany, Italy and Spain. Nowadays, the "Colonia Humboldt" neighborhood shows the influence of the Germans in the city's architecture, and in the town of Chipilo, now absorbed by the metropolitan area of the city, people still speak the Italian Venetian dialect of their great-grandparents.