Copala, Sinaloa
Encyclopedia
Sinaloa
Sinaloa officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sinaloa is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 18 municipalities and its capital city is Culiacán Rosales....
. The town is in the municipality of Concordia
Concordia, Sinaloa
Concordia is a city and its surrounding municipality in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. It stands at.The municipality reported 27,815 inhabitants in the 2000 census. Concordia's former name was San Sebastián. It is best known for its furniture factory....
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History
The area was occupied and ruled by the indigenousIndigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
peoples until 1564, when Francisco de Ibarra
Francisco de Ibarra
Francisco de Ibarra was a Spanish Basque explorer, founder of the city of Durango, and governor of the Spanish province of Nueva Vizcaya, in present-day Mexico.-Biography:...
crossed the Sierra Madre Occidental
Sierra Madre Occidental
The Sierra Madre Occidental is a mountain range in western Mexico.-Setting:The range runs north to south, from just south of the Sonora–Arizona border southeast through eastern Sonora, western Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, Nayarit, Jalisco, Aguascalientes to Guanajuato, where it joins...
from Durango
Durango, Durango
-Climate:The city of Durango has a semi-arid climate, classified as Bsk in the Koppen system. The climate is temperate in the western portion , with the average annual temperature being 15 °C and consisting of an average annual rainfall of 1,600 millimeters. In the eastern region, the average...
and conquered the area for Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. In 1565 prospectors discovered silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
veins and the town of Copala was founded to serve the mines. The town was named after a mythical city of gold for which de Ibarra had unsuccessfully searched in northern Mexico.
The town of Copala was destroyed in 1616 by an uprising of Tepehuan
Tepehuán
The Tepehuán are a Native American ethnic group in northwest Mexico, whose villages at the time of Spanish conquest spanned a large territory along the Sierra Madre Occidental from Chihuahua and Durango in the north to Jalisco in the south...
Indians, but was rebuilt after the rebellion was quelled the following year.
Geography
Copala is located at 23°23′41"N 105°55′57"W, at an altitude of 610 m. The town is along Federal Highway 40Mexican Federal Highway 40
Mexican Federal Highway 40, also called the "Carretera Interoceánica" is a road beginning at Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and ending at Mazatlán, Sinaloa, at the Pacific coast...
, approximately 50 km east of Mazatlán
Mazatlán
Mazatlán is a city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa; the surrounding municipio for which the city serves as the municipal seat is Mazatlán Municipality. It is located at on the Pacific coast, across from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.Mazatlán is a Nahuatl word meaning...
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