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Founding
Founding of Culiacán
capital of the State of Sinaloa, Mexico
- 29 September 1531
- Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Founding
capital of the State of Sinaloa, Mexico
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Culiacán, officially Culiacán Rosales, is the capital and largest city of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico. Located within the Culiacán Municipality, the city was founded on 29 September 1531, by the Spanish conquistadors Lázaro de Cebreros and Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán. It was originally named "Villa de San Miguel", in honor of its patron saint Michael the Archangel.
As of the 2020 census, Culiacán had an estimated population of 808,416, making it the 21st most populous city in Mexico. Its metropolitan area, with a population of 1,003,530, was the 17th most populous metropolitan area in Mexico.
The city sits in a valley on the slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental, at the confluence of the Tamazula and Humaya Rivers, where both join to form the Culiacán River. 55 meters above sea level.
The name derives from the Nahuatl colhua ("ancestor" or a tribal name) and the locative –cán ("place"), rendering "place of the Colhua". Some historians alternatively interpret it as "snake place" or "crooked hill". The most accepted theory is "place of the colhuas", or "inhabited by the colhua tribe", and the most frequent meaning is "place of worshiping the god Coltzin".
An ancient indigenous settlement called Huey Colhuacan dates back to Tecpatl, which corresponds to 628 CE. The Aztecs built it during their pilgrimage. Its exact location is unknown, but it is generally assumed that it was close to the current town of Culiacáncito.
The city known today as Culiacán was co-founded in 1531 by conquistadors Lázaro de Cebreros and Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán under the name "Villa de San Miguel". Upon their arrival in the 16th century, the Spanish found that farmhouses were organized into indigenous nations by the tribe of the Tahues, which brought together people of the same origin and language with a common tradition.
Other indigenous peoples that inhabited the original territory of Culiacán were the Tebacas, Pacaxes, Sabaibo, and Achires.
After their conquest in 1531, de Cebreros and de Guzmán organized the acquired territories into three provinces. One of them was Culiacán, which was delimited to the South by the Elota River and to the North by the Mocorito River, depending on the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia. Organized in this way, the territory lasted until 1786, the year in which the administration system was implemented, with Sonora and Sinaloa forming the province of Arizpe and the older province of Culiacán remaining the same.
On 6 October 1821, independence was proclaimed at Culiacán. It was granted city status on 21 July 1823, when the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa were separated by decree from Congress. In 1824, under the Constitutive Act of the Mexican Federation, Sinaloa and Sonora reunited to form the Estado de Occidente. On 13 October 1830, the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa were definitively separated by decree, with the city of Culiacán designated the capital of the state of Sinaloa. In 1861, during the conservative government of the French Intervention, prefectures were established, and the Municipalities Law was enacted, dividing the Districts into City Councils. The Badiraguato District was suppressed and became a municipality within the Culiacán District.
From 1859 to 1873, the capital of Sinaloa was moved from Culiacán to Mazatlán. In the Restored Republic, Governor Eustaquio Buelna confronted the merchants of the port. He returned to Culiacán, and the Local Congress granted it the status of the state capital.
In 1878, Culiacán had three City Halls, whose headwaters were Culiacán, Quilá, and Badiraguato. This remained the case until 1880, when Badiraguato reverted to being a district with the limits that had previously applied to it.
Municipalities were established by law in 1912 as a new form of internal government. However, this law did not come into force until 1915, when political directors were abolished, thereby freeing the districts. Culiacán was established as a municipality by decree on 8 April 1915. Within its original limits was the current Municipality of Navolato, which was segregated from Culiacán on 27 August 1982, depriving the city of 2,285 square kilometres (882 mi2) of valley agriculture.
Sometime later, the State Congress approved the extension of the capital city's name, giving it its current official name of Culiacán de Rosales. "Rosales" honors the Mexican military general Antonio Rosales, who fought in the second French Intervention and the Reform War, along with serving as the governor of Sinaloa.
During World War II, the United States experienced shortages of medical morphine after opium supplies from Asia were disrupted by the Pacific War. In response, Mexican authorities, in cooperation with U.S. officials, expanded regulated opium poppy cultivation in northwestern Mexico, including rural areas surrounding Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa. Farmers in the mountainous regions of Sierra Madre Occidental, near the city, produced opium that was processed into legal morphine for wartime medical use by Allied forces. Although the program ended after 1945, the agricultural knowledge, smuggling routes, and local intermediary networks developed during the wartime period persisted. Historians and criminologists have identified these postwar networks as an early foundation for later illicit drug trafficking organizations in Sinaloa.
From the late 1950s onward, Culiacán emerged as a major hub for drug trafficking to the United States. The completion of the Pan-American Highway and the regional airport in the 1960s accelerated the expansion of workable distribution infrastructure for the few enterprising families that would later come to dominate the international drug cartels along Mexico's Pacific Northwest. The Sinaloa Cartel made Culiacán its primary base.
On 17 October 2019, after an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to arrest one of the Sinaloa Cartel's leaders, widespread gunfights broke out across the city, leading to multiple deaths, in what has been called the "Battle of Culiacán". One of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's relatives, Ovidio Guzmán, was arrested, but the police were eventually forced to release him.
The coat of arms for both the municipality and the city of Culiacán has various elements that represent their history.
Rolando Arjona Amábilis designed the coat of arms, and on 26 May 1960, municipal decree number 13 made his design Culiacán's official coat of arms. It was published in number 90 of the Official Newspaper of the State of Sinaloa on 30 July 1960. Its shape is square with rounded corners ending in a point. The entire face of the shield is covered with a carmine color. A hieroglyph sits in the middle representing a hill with a human head bowing forward. The glyph alludes to Coltzin, "the crooked god," a figure of Nahua mythology, who gave his name to the Nahuatlaca-Colhua tribe and to the town they lived in, Colhuacán or Teocolhuacán.
Across the front of the shield, blue lines represent rivers. A black cross sits in the middle-left, next to a path with footprints leading to a small structure in the top-right. These motifs symbolize the missionaries who ventured north from San Miguel de Culiacán and pay homage to their benevolence and heroism.
The border bears the Spanish name "Culiacán" at the top and the Nahuatl name "Colhuacán" at the bottom. At the top of the shield is a hill with a germinating seed and a golden sun, alluding to the region's tropical climate and agricultural industry.
The government of the municipality of Culiacán is represented by its City Council, which is elected by universal, direct, and secret vote for a term of three years. The term is not renewable for the immediate period, but can be continuous. The elected officials begin exercising their positions on 1 January of the year following the election. The City Council is composed of the Municipal President, a Procurator Trustee, and a body of councilors consisting of 18 representatives elected by relative majority and seven by the principle of proportional representation.
For its internal regime, the municipality is subdivided into 17 receiverships, which in turn are divided into police stations. The 17 receiverships of the municipality are: El Salado, Higueras de Abuya, Baila, Aguaruto, Emiliano Zapata, Adolfo López Mateos (El Tamarindo), Jesús María, Las Tapias, Quilá, Sanalona, San Lorenzo, Tacuichamona, Tepuche, Imala, Costa Rica, Culiacáncito, and Eldorado.
Culiacán is located in the central region of the State of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico. The coordinates that correspond to it are 24°48'15" N (latitude) by 107°25'52" W (West), with an altitude of 54 meters above sea level.
The city is located 1,240 kilometres (770 mi) from Mexico City. From Culiacán to Tepic is 502 km; to Durango, 536 km; to Hermosillo, 688 km; to Guadalajara, 708 km; to Monterrey, 1,118 km; to Chihuahua, 1,159 km; to Tijuana, 1,552 km; and to Matamoros, 1,434 km.
The mountainous part and the coastal plain clearly define the municipality's relief. The mountainous part corresponds to the physiographic region of the highlands, part of the Pacific slope of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range with elevations of 300 to 2,100 meters above sea level. The coastal plain lies to the West and is crossed by four regional rivers: the Humaya, Tamazula, Culiacán and San Lorenzo. The Humaya originates in the State of Durango, entering Sinaloa through Badiraguato; the Licenciado Adolfo López Mateos dam regulates its waters. The Tamazula River originates in the Sierra Madre Occidental near the Topia Valley; the Sanalona Dam regulates its waters. The Humaya and Tamazula Rivers unite in front of the city of Culiacán to form the Culiacán River, which empties into the Gulf of California. The San Lorenzo is born from the Sierra Madre Occidental within the State of Durango, enters Sinaloa through Cosalá, and empties into the Gulf of California.
Culiacán has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen: BSh), despite receiving an annual rainfall over 600 mm (24 in), due to its hot temperatures and high evaporation. Summers are very hot and humid, shade temperatures can reach 45 °C (113 °F) and high humidity can produce heat indices of 50 to 55 °C (122 to 131 °F), with the risk of heavy rainfall from decaying tropical cyclones also present. Winters are much milder, with lower humidity, an average high of 27 °C, and warm nights.
The Municipality of Culiacán has a total population of 858,638 inhabitants, according to the 2010 Population and Housing Census carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). It has a population density of 166.8 inhabitants / km2; the Municipality concentrates 31% of the population in the State of Sinaloa, with 422,507 men and 436,131 women, with a ratio of 96.9 men for every 100 women.
The city of Culiacán Rosales occupies only a part of the municipality of Culiacán and in 2010 had an urban area of 65 km2, being the largest in the state of Sinaloa with a population of 675,773 inhabitants (of which 329,608 are men and 346,165 are women), according to the 2010 census, resulting in a population density of 10,396.5 inhabitants/km2. The city concentrates 78.7% of the total urban population of the Municipality. The ethnic groups most represented in the Municipality are the Mixtec and Nahuatl, the total population of indigenous language speakers (HLI population) is 13,081 people. On the other hand, in the urban area of Culiacán, there are only 3,536 indigenous people.
The city ranks 20th in the number of foreign population, which amounts to 6,693 inhabitants, representing almost 1% of the total population; Among the main nationalities are Americans, Canadians, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Argentines, Cubans, Colombians, Brazilians, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Germans, among others.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Culiacán”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.