Palacio Municipal de San Cristóbal de las Casas

The Palacio Municipal fronts Plaza 31 de Marzo, the square named for the date in 1528 when the Spanish captain Diego de Mazariegos formally founded the highland town under the name Villa Real de Chiapa, later elevated to Ciudad Real and, from 1848, renamed San Cristóbal de las Casas in honour of the Dominican bishop and indigenous-rights advocate Bartolomé de las Casas. The current building is a nineteenth-century neoclassical reconstruction, replacing an earlier colonial town hall, and its arcaded ground-floor portico of round arches and paired columns is characteristic of Mexican municipal architecture of the Porfiriato period rather than the plateresque or baroque style of the town's religious buildings from the same era. Inside, the building continues to house active municipal government offices, meaning most of the interior is not open for general sightseeing, though the ground-floor arcade and the upper balcony, from which officials traditionally address the plaza on civic occasions, remain visible from the square. INAH and municipal authorities have maintained the facade with periodic repainting and masonry repair rather than major structural intervention, keeping its neoclassical proportions intact since the nineteenth-century rebuild. The surrounding arcades along the plaza's other sides, built in a matching style, extend the same colonial-to-Porfiriato architectural transition seen across San Cristóbal's historic centre. As the administrative anchor of the plaza that carries the town's founding date in its name, the Palacio Municipal functions less as a historical exhibit than as a still-active seat of local government whose facade and plaza setting are themselves the primary historical artefact, standing on the same ground where Mazariegos's founding ceremony took place nearly five centuries ago.