Orizaba

Municipality and town

Catedral de San Miguel Arcángel in Orizaba

Coat of arms

Country

Mexico

State

Veracruz

Government

• Mayor

Juan Manuel Diez Francos (PRI)

Time zone

Central Standard Time (UTC-6)

• Summer (DST)

Central Daylight Time (UTC-5)

Orizaba (Spanish [ori'saba] ) is a city and municipality in the Mexican state of Veracruz. It is located 20 km west of its sister city Córdoba, and is adjacent to Río Blanco and Ixtaczoquitlán, on Federal Highways 180 and 190. The city had a 2005 census population of 117,273 and is almost coextensive with its small municipality, with only a few small areas outside the city. The municipality's population was 117,289 and it has an area of 27.97 km² (10.799 sq mi).

It is generally understood that the name Orizaba comes from a Hispanicized pronunciation of the Nahuatl name Ahuilizapan [āwil-lis-ā-pan], which means "valley of happy waters." Another possibility, however, is the word Harish (Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, in 16th-century Spanish pronunciation), this place being the hometown of the first Spanish settlers (1521) of Orizaba. Harish or—in a simplified form—Ariz, with the addition (under the influence of the Arabic language) of the gentilic "i" and/or with the ending "aba", meaning fortification, would have become Ariziba or Arizaba, from which Orizaba would have derived. (The word Harish—in turn—is, according to some authors, linked to the capital of Tartessus and could refer to the biblical Tarshish. Its Semitic meaning could be "trading post" or "fundry site", since Tartessus was a major Phoenician center of tin commerce and bronze production.)

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