Map - Querétaro, Querétaro (Querétaro)

Santiago de Querétaro (Otomi: Dähnini Maxei), known simply as Querétaro City (Ciudad de Querétaro), is the capital and largest city of the state of Querétaro, located in central Mexico. It is part of the macroregion of Bajío. It is 213 km northwest of Mexico City, 63 km southeast of San Miguel de Allende and 200 km south of San Luis Potosí. It is also the seat of the municipality of Querétaro, divided into seven boroughs. In 1996, the historic center of Querétaro was declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO.

The city is a strong business and economic center and a vigorous service center that is experiencing an ongoing social and economic revitalization. All this has resulted in high levels of migration from other parts of Mexico.

Querétaro has seen outstanding industrial and economic development since the mid-1990s. Querétaro metropolitan area has the 2nd highest GDP per capita among Mexico's metropolitan areas with US$20,000 after Monterrey. The city is the fastest-growing in the country, basing its economy on IT and data centers, logistics services, aircraft manufacturing and maintenance, call centers, the automotive and machinery industries, and the production of chemicals and food products. The region of Querétaro has a rapidly growing vineyards agriculture and hosts the famous wine producer from Spain Freixenet. Wine production in Querétaro is now the second largest in Mexico after that of the Baja California region.

Major international corporations in the aerospace, electronics, automotive, chemical, food, and financial areas have their national headquarters in Querétaro.

In the Otomi language, it is referred to as "Maxei" or "Ndamaxei", which means ball game and the grand ball game respectively. In the Mendocino Codex the town is called Tlaschco or Tlaxco, from the Nahuatl word for ball game. However, Querétaro most likely comes from k'eri ireta rho, meaning place of the great people, especially since during Aztec times about 15,000 people lived here. Querétaro has an Aztec glyph to represent it as it was a tributary province. In 1655, it received a coat of arms from the Spanish Crown.

The word Querétaro was voted by 33,000 participants as "the most beautiful word in the Spanish language", before being approved by the Instituto Cervantes. In Pre-Columbian terminology, Querétaro literally means "the island of the blue salamanders." Nevertheless, other scholars suggest that it can mean "place of the reptiles" or "place of the giant rocks."