Santiago Sacatepéquez is located in a valley that the Spanish conquistadores called "de Sacatepéquez" (English: Valle of Sacatepéquez) in the 1520s. That valley was bordered by the valley of Xilotepeque on the West, those of Mixco and las Vacas on the North, and by the Chiquimula province and the South and East. The town was described as a rich town with several hundred families and as having "cold climate" by Irish friar Thomas Gage in his 1648 book about his travels through America in the 1620s and 1630s.
