Santiago de Querétaro

Clean air, safe streets, friendly people, and oozing old world charm, not to mention the highest GDP in the country. Sound like a place you'd like to move? Those things have made the beautiful Mexican city, Santiago de Querétaro (the capital of the state of Querétaro), the fastest growing metropolis in the country.

Originally settled as early as the year 200, and later developed by several indigenous tribes, it was eventually occupied by the Spanish in the early 1600s for it's strategic location between Mexico City and the ocean. The first woman to appear on a Mexican coin, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, was the wife of Querétaro's mayor and a heroine of the Mexican Revolution. The city became the capital of Mexico for a time during the Mexican-American war, and it was in Querétaro that Emperor Maximilian was eventually captured, tried, and executed in 1867.

In 1996 UNESCO declared the historic center of Querétaro as a World Heritage Site because of its tradition for peaceful co-existence between the indigenous tribes and eventual settlers from outside. From UNESCO's website, "the old colonial town of Querétaro is unusual in having retained the geometric street plan of the Spanish conquerors side by side with the twisting alleys of the Otomi quarters. The Otomi, the Tarasco, the Chichimeca and the Spanish lived together peacefully in the town with similar standards of living, a rare occurrence at a time when the Indigenous and Hispanic were usually separated by a large income gap and at odds with one another in other parts of the nation.” Querétaro has also preserved most of the stone streets, public plazas, and gorgeous civil and religious monuments and buildings from its golden age in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2008, National Geographic named Querétaro as one of the top 15 historic destinations of the world."

Now Mexico's 4th largest city, Santiago de Querétaro is getting crowded, evidenced by the long, peaceful lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots for a new President, Senator, and Governor yesterday. The current population already exceeds one million and many thousands of Mexican citizens continue to flock to this international gem. One can only hope that the city will be able to continue to preserve the magnificent streets, churches, buildings and heritage as they've worked so painstakingly to do for these hundreds of years.

I'm not Peter Dekom, just one of the hundreds of employees here at Unshred America, but I thought you might like to know anyway. Back to Mr. Dekom...