Jonacatepec

I arrived in Jonacatepec in November on a Thursday afternoon, coming from Cuautla on a local bus that dropped me at a junction where I wasn’t entirely sure I was in the right place. It took about fifteen minutes of walking through quiet residential streets before the church appeared. When it did, I stopped.

The Parroquia de San Mateo Apóstol has a facade that belongs in a cathedral city. Churrigueresque stonework climbing both towers, carved saints in their niches, the whole thing in a warm ochre stone that was catching the November light at a low, golden angle. The town around it — maybe eight thousand people, a market, a hardware store, some houses behind painted walls — is not proportionate to the ambition of that facade. This is a recurring feature of colonial Morelos, the way the church-building program of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced monuments in towns that were meant to serve much larger communities, and instead ended up anchoring smaller ones. The church outlasted the logic that built it.

The Dry Lowland Pace

Eastern Morelos is not the Morelos most people know. The Morelos of travel writing is Cuernavaca and Tepoztlán — colonial grandeur and weekend escapes from Mexico City. Jonacatepec is something else: the semi-arid plateau that runs toward Puebla, where the vegetation is dry scrub and maguey and the towns feel genuinely removed from the capital’s gravitational pull.

The landscape around the town tells you what the economy is. Maguey plants on the hillsides — some managed, most just growing as they have always grown, their grey-green rosettes visible from the road. Some of the maguey here feeds pulque production in the surrounding communities, a tradition that predates the Spanish by many centuries and that has been having a quiet revival in the past decade. I didn’t find pulque in Jonacatepec itself, but I found it nearby, and its earthy sourness felt appropriate to this landscape.

The town operates at a pace I’ve come to associate with the lowland Mexican towns that have nothing to perform for anyone. No particular tourism economy, no notable restaurant scene, a market that gets livelier on Sundays. The streets near the church were nearly empty when I arrived, which felt like the right way to encounter it.

The Market Stall and the Ruins I Didn’t Quite Reach

There’s a Sunday market in Jonacatepec that draws people from the surrounding ranchos — mostly agricultural goods, chile, some prepared food. I was there on a Thursday, which meant a reduced version of it, but there were still a few food stalls operating near the market building. I bought something at one of them — a small tostada topped with what I think was pulled chicken in a mole verde — from a woman whose stall had no name and no sign, and ate it standing at the edge of the street.

It was very good. The mole verde had a freshness that I can only attribute to the tomatillos being local and recent. I considered going back for another but walked to look at the church instead, which I don’t regret.

The Augustinian ruins I’d read about — a 16th-century visita built in the early decades of the colonial period — are somewhere in the hills above the valley, and I ran out of time before I could find them properly. The Augustinian order spread through Morelos with impressive speed in the 1530s and 1540s, building a network of open-air chapels and simple convents to serve indigenous communities scattered across the landscape. Most of these are now in various states of ruin, half-absorbed by vegetation, which makes them harder to find and more interesting when you do.

I’ll come back on a Sunday in late autumn, when the market is full and the light is the same and the facade of San Mateo is still too large for the town it serves.

Getting There

Jonacatepec is reached by local bus or colectivo from Cuautla, the main hub of eastern Morelos. The journey takes roughly 45 minutes. There are no hotels in Jonacatepec that I know of — this is a half-day or day-trip destination from Cuautla or, at a stretch, from Cuernavaca. Come on a Sunday if you can, when the market gives the town a different energy. Come in the dry season — October through February — when the light on that church facade is worth the journey on its own.