Map - Tomatlán

Tomatlán (meaning "Tomato land" or "place of tomato" from Nahuatl) is a town and municipality, in Jalisco south of Cabo Corrientes in central-western Mexico. The municipality covers an area of 153 km².

As of 2015, the municipality had a total population of 35,824 people.

The final portion of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi is set in Tomatlán, where the character Pi Patel reaches land after being stranded in the Pacific Ocean.

Before the arrival of the conquerors, the region was populated by various groups. On Holy Monday of 1525, from El Tuito the conquerors arrived in Tomatlan. The night they spent the night in a village of the cacique, they received them with dances and plumeríos. They wore crowns and scapulars, as they were part of the Province of Los Coronados de El Tuito. There they celebrated Holy Week and Easter. In the place occupied by the Cué, a pagan shrine, they built a “pajarete” church that Brother Juan de Villa Diego blessed, dedicating it to San Antonio.

They baptized the town and the river with the name of Easter, subsequently following Colima. Thus this town was subdued by Francisco Cortés de San Buenaventura. The region was very inhabited. Disseminated in it there were numerous villages currently occupying the place of some, small rancherías.

In 1541 this region revolted and had to go with its people Pedro de Alvarado from Santiago de Manzanillo twice to fight the insurgents. From 1533 to 1574 it was entrusted to Juan Fernández de Híjar with a seat in Villa de Purificación.

Through the proclamation the town knew, in 1730, that English soldiers were disembarking in the cove of Arcos and that the Justice of the Valley of Banderas lacked soldiers to make the defense. 50 soldiers and 100 locals came to the aid of him. They were commanded by Captain Diego de Betancourt.

At the beginning of the War of Independence in the year of 1810, Cura Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla sent his nephew Miguel the Lego Gallaga to coordinate the movement on the coasts of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit.5

In October 1811, after the battle of Palo Blanco, Lego Gallaga, together with Sandoval and Toral, he retired to Mascota and the Coast along the course of the Banderas Valley, where he separated from them, reaching Tomatlán. Gallaga made words with the Sandoval, then, one of those who accompanied Sandoval made fire on the Lego, who was seriously injured. Sandoval immediately ordered him to be shot in front of the Temple of Santo Santiago; Gallaga, lying there on her knees, implored the mercy of God, sold her eyes herself with her handkerchief, and gave the voice of fire falling dead with two bullets. The Indians who were very fond of him, picked up his body, took him to the presbytery of the parish, opened a sepulcher in which an ecclesiastic was buried in a drawer from which they took him out, and then deposited the remains of Gallaga, being the tragic one The end of this famous layman, who gave so much to the troops of Nueva Galicia. Since 1825 belonged to the 6th. Canton of Autlán until 1878 when it happens to depend on the 10 canton of Mascota. The decree of September 23, 1878 already refers to Tomatlán as a municipal entity.