Tlalpan

Tlalpan, later called Talpa, was the centre of a lordship in the Sierra Occidental. The settlement lay in a mountainous district inhabited by Nahuatl-speaking people. Spanish explorers entered the area in the early 1530s, after which its communities came under the Spanish Crown.

A small image of the Virgin of the Rosary, made from maize stalk paste in Michoacán, reached Talpa during the colonial period. By the seventeenth century it stood in a chapel dependent on the parish of Guachinango. It was built with the help of miners and the labour of local converts. Tradition relates that in 1644 the worn image was to be buried, but was miraculously renewed as María Tenanchi prepared to remove it. The story helped make Talpa a place of pilgrimage.