Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl

An ancient love story told on two real active volcanoes

In Tlaxcaltec legend, Iztaccíhuatl was a princess who fell in love with Popocatépetl, one of her father's warriors. The emperor sent him to war in Oaxaca and promised her to him on his return, never expecting him to come back. She was falsely told he had died in battle and died of grief. When he returned and found her dead, he carried her body to a place outside Tenochtitlan and knelt by her grave, and the gods covered them both with snow and turned them into mountains. Her ridge, the White Woman, looks like a woman lying on her back and is nicknamed La Mujer Dormida, the Sleeping Woman. He became a volcano, raining fire in his rage at losing her. In another version Popocatépetl fights Nevado de Toluca for her and cuts off its head, the explanation given for Toluca's rounded summit.

Popocatépetl, Nahuatl for Smoking Mountain, rises to 5,393 metres, second in Mexico only to Pico de Orizaba, 70 km southeast of Mexico City, and is joined to Iztaccíhuatl to the north by a high saddle, the Paso de Cortés. The volcano is about 730,000 years old. Of three Plinian eruptions in the last few thousand years, the last two buried the nearby village of Tetimpa, and there have been more than 15 major eruptions since the Spanish arrived in 1519, the year Diego de Ordaz led the first recorded European ascent. Activity picked up again in 1991, smoke has risen from the crater constantly since 1993, and the glaciers were gone by early 2001. In December 2000 tens of thousands of people were evacuated on the scientists' warnings. Locals call it El Popo, or Don Goyo, after a story of an old man on the slopes named Gregorio Chino Popocatépetl, the spirit of the volcano, who warns people before an eruption. Every 12 March people from Santiago Xalitzina bring the mountain flowers and food.

Lower down stand 15 monasteries built by the first Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian missionaries in the early 16th century, among them Tepoztlan and Tlayacapan in Morelos and Calpan and Tochimilco in Puebla. They were laid out with wide atria and open chapels for the crowds being converted, and UNESCO lists them together as the Earliest 16th-Century Monasteries on the Slopes of Popocatepetl.