The Largest City in the Colony

From the very beginning Mexico City was easily the largest city in the colony, maintaining a population advantage of nearly three-to-one over its nearest competitor, Puebla. By the 1790s Mexico City contained around 130,000 people, and Puebla perhaps 55,000. In the eighteenth century Puebla's immediate region developed significantly through commercial agriculture, and the city itself prospered as a processing and cotton-textile production center. Despite being the colony's major port, Veracruz had a population of only 15,000 at the same time, suffering from its unhealthy, tropical climate and from Spaniards' traditional dislike for residing along a coast. Hardly a single other city in Mexico developed significantly in the seventeenth century, so the networks of Mexico, Puebla, and Veracruz from the center of the colony to the east coast and of Mexico City to Zacatecas in the north remained dominant and rather stable for about one and one-half centuries.

These patterns were modified only incrementally even late in the colonial period. On the west coast, Acapulco languished in a quite primitive state as a port for the Manila Galleon, which came from the Philippines only once or twice a year, with some incidental coastal trade, and as a naval fortress to protect the colony from attack on the Pacific side. Other ports such as San Blas, Tampico, and Campeche hardly merited designations as towns and barely survived conducting a modest amount of commerce for their regions.

The rapid growth of a complex of cities along the plain known as the Bajío a couple hundred miles north of Mexico City in the eighteenth century constitute the most significant modification of the pattern of urbanization that had prevailed in colonial Mexico until that time. Querétaro, near the southern end of the region, had been the first of its cities to grow to any size. Its early importance derived from its location along the route from Zacatecas to Mexico City. Eventually several major routes through the north converged at Querétaro, but in size and importance it did not earn the official designation of "city" with its own municipal council until 1656. In the eighteenth century, Querétaro developed a major woolen textile industry supplying the now-substantial population of the region. By the 1790s it had a population over 30,000. But the city in the Bajío that led the growth spurt in the eighteenth century was Guanajuato. A secondary silver-mining camp since the mid-sixteenth century, it had a population of only some 16,000 in 1700. Then the rapid development of its mines in the middle and late decades of the eighteenth century sent its urban population to over 32,000, and its larger municipal population to some 55,000 by 1792.