Malinalco
municipal seat of Malinalco, State of México, Mexico
Malinalco (Spanish pronunciation: [maliˈnalko]) is the municipality inside of Ixtapan Region, is a town and municipality located 65 kilometers south of the city of Toluca in the south of the western portion of the State of Mexico. Malinalco is 115 km (71 mi) southwest of Mexico City.
Malinalco has always been associated with magic or sorcery due to the legend that it was the home of the goddess Malinalxochitl. The municipality is home to the famed village of Chalma, where according to legend, an image of a Black Christ miraculously appeared in a cave that was devoted to the god Oxtoteotl. It is the second-most visited shrine in Mexico, after the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The Aztecs conquered the area in the 1470s, and established a sanctuary for their military elite, the Eagle and Jaguar warriors. The complex was built on the Cerro de los Idolos (Hill of the Idols), over an older ceremonial site. The main attraction of this archeological site is the Cuauhcalli or House of Eagles, which is a building carved out of the side of the mountain.
The name Malinalco comes from the Nahuatl word malinalli, which is a kind of grass (Poaceae) called zacate del carbonero in Spanish, the word xóchitl, which means flower and co, which means place, which a translation of "where they worship the goddess Malinalxóchitl, the malinalli flower". The name also refers to one of the time periods on the Aztec calendar, marked by the malinalli plant, according to the Quauhtinchan Annals.
“Malinalco” enters the record as municipal seat of Malinalco, State of México, Mexico. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Malinalco, municipal and seat can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1584311. VIAF identifies the subject as 133697568. The Library of Congress control number is n81029037. Authority coordinates are 18.950, -99.500. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Malinalco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.