Cuajimalpa

San Lorenzo Acopilco: Rural Pueblo in the Forest

The original chapel in San Lorenzo Acopilco was built by the Spanish church lawyer turned bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, who sought to build "hospital" towns, refuges from the plundering and exploitation of the conquistadors. In 1532, he first established such a town in the Sierra des las Cruces mountains that he called Santa Fe (Holy Faith). He built his second chapel in the indgenous village of Acopilco four years later. Sourrounded by evergreen forests, it retains its rural nature. 

Lions in the Desert: The Carmelite Order, The Conquest of the Spirit & The Spiritual Conquest

In addition to the Carmelite convents of San Angel, in Delegación Álvaro Obregón, and San Joaquin, in Delegacion Miguel Hidalgo, there is a third that still stands within Mexico City. However, unlike the other two we have visited, it sits in a "desert". But this "desert" is a dense forest of conifers in mountains that rise to 3,800 meters, 12,400 feet in altitude, 5,000 ft. above the valley floor. It is within a national park, Desierto de los Leones, Desert of the Lions, within the Delegación of Cuajimalpa.

What does it mean that this convent is "in the desert". And why was it built so far from colonial Mexico City and the original indigenous villages around the Lakes? Answering these questions requires that we go back in time three hundred years before the Carmelites arrived in Nueva España and from Spain to the other end of the Mediterranean, to the time of the Crusades to the Holy Land.