Xalapan

Xalapan was a Nahua polity centred on Xalapa beneath the Macuiltepetl volcano in the Veracruz highlands. Its name meant spring in the sand; around 1313, four villages merged into the town where its peoples lived in 1337.

In the late fifteenth century Moctezuma Ilhuicamina incorporated the district into the Aztec Empire. Hernán Cortés passed through in 1519 on his march to Tenochtitlan; Franciscan friars completed a convent in 1555, and the town grew as a market for medicinal plants. Charles IV formally declared it a town in 1791.