San Bartolo Coyotepec 5.1

San Bartolo Coyotepec is a town and municipality located in the center of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is in the Centro District of the Valles Centrales region about fifteen km south of the capital of Oaxaca.The town is best known for its Barro negro pottery - black clay pottery. For hundreds of years pottery has been made here with a gray matte finish, but in the 1950s a technique was devised to give the pieces a shiny black finish without painting. This has made the pottery far more popular and collectable. The town is home to the Museo Estatal de Arte Popular de Oaxaca (State Museum of Popular Art of Oaxaca) which was opened here in 2004, with a large portion of its collection consisting of barro negro pottery. There is also a barro negro mural on the recently opened Baseball Academy.HistoryThe area was the settled homeland of the ancient Mesoamerican Zapotec civilization going back at least 2500 years, with the oldest archeological finds being in the Valley of Oaxaca. Its Zapotec language name is Zaapeche, place of many jaguars (Panthera onca). In 1521, the area became an encomiendo under Bartolomé Sánchez who named the settlement, San Jacinto Leontepec. Later, this was changed to the current name. San Bartolo refers to the patron saint, Bartholomew and Coyotepec is from Nahuatl meaning "hill of coyotes."