The spring at El Chorro is where San Miguel was founded in the sixteenth century, and the stepped stone washing basins built beside it in the 1700s are still there under a row of trees — open-air, communal, and used within living memory. Just above sits Parque Juárez and the terraces that climb toward the Mirador. It takes a few minutes to see and costs nothing, but it is the one spot that explains why a town is here at all, on a dry ridge with no river.