The altepetl, in Pre-Columbian and Spanish conquest-era Aztec society, was the local, ethnically based political entity. It is usually translated into English as "city-state". The word is a combination of the Nahuatl words ā-tl, meaning water, and tepē-tl, meaning mountain.
Nahuatl scholars Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart have stated:
A characteristic Nahua mode was to imagine the totality of the people of a region or of the world as a collection of altepetl units and to speak of them on those terms.
They prefer the Nahuatl term over any English-language approximation. They argue that in many of the documents pertaining to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the word āltepētl is often used as a translation of the Spanish Ciudad de México (Mexico City), a translation that has colored the interpretation of the texts and conceptions of Nahua society.
The concept is comparable to Maya cah and Mixtec ñuu.