Naucalpan

Naucalpan, officially Naucalpan de Juárez, is one of 125 municipalities located just northwest of Mexico City in the adjoining State of Mexico. The municipal seat is the city of Naucalpan de Juárez, which extends into the neighboring municipality of Huixquilucan.

The name Naucalpan comes from Nahuatl and means "place of the four neighborhoods" or "four houses." Juárez was added to the official name in 1874 in honor of Benito Juárez. The history of the area begins with the Tlatilica who settled on the edges of the Hondo River between 1700 and 600 B.C.E., but it was the Mexica who gave it its current name when they dominated it from the 15th century until the Spanish conquest of the Mexica Empire. Naucalpan claims to be the area where Hernán Cortés rested on the "Noche Triste" as they fled Tenochtitlan in 1520, but this is disputed. It is the home of the Virgin of Los Remedios, a small image of the Virgin Mary which is strongly associated with the Conquest and is said to have been left here.

Today, the city of Naucalpan is actually larger than the municipality itself, with part of it extending into neighboring Huixquilucan Municipality, although there are other towns in within the municipality of Naucalpan which are outside the city of Naucalpan. It is a major center of industry in Mexico. It is, however, best known as the location of Ciudad Satélite, a development from the 1960s and the site of the Toreo de Cuatro Caminos bullring, which was demolished in the 2010s to build the Toreo Parque Central mixed-use development. The only unurbanized areas of the municipality are the Los Remedios National Park and a number of ejidos, but the lack of housing has put serious pressure on these areas.