San Miguel Zinacantepec

Zinacantepec is a town and municipality located just west of the city of Toluca in Mexico State, Mexico. The community is named after a small mountain which contained two caves which used to be filled with thousands of bats. Zinacantepec is Nahuatl for Bat Mountain.

Its Aztec glyph is a bat on a mountain. In the 18th century, the population of this mountain moved to settle alongside the Franciscan monastery established here in the 16th century. This monastery is the best preserved of a network of missionaries established in the Toluca Valley in the mid 16th century. Today, the complex functions as the parish church, with the cloister dedicated as the colonial era museum of the state of Mexico.