Present-day Mexican territory was one of the planet's few cradles of original civilization, alongside Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley, China and the Andes. The first human groups arrived more than thirteen thousand years ago, hunters of the megafauna of the end of the last glaciation whose traces have been found at sites such as Tlapacoya and the caves of Coxcatlán, in the Tehuacán valley, where some seven thousand years ago the domestication of maize began —the plant that would sustain every Mesoamerican culture.
The slow transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture allowed, towards the second millennium before our era, the rise of settled villages. Around maize, beans, squash and chili —the 'milpa' that still feeds Mexico— a complex ritual and social life took shape. Mesoamerica was thus born, a cultural area covering the center and south of the country and much of Central America, united by shared traits: the cultivation of maize, the ritual ball game, the 260-day and 365-day calendars, writing, the building of pyramids and a pantheon of shared gods.
On that agricultural base, over the following three thousand years, dozens of ever more complex societies would rise, from lordships to great city-states and tributary empires, in a mosaic of peoples and languages of astonishing diversity that is the deepest root of Mexican identity.
Around 1500-1200 BC, in the warm lowlands of the Gulf, in the present-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco, the Olmec culture flourished, considered by many specialists the 'mother culture' of Mesoamerica. At centers such as San Lorenzo first and La Venta later, the Olmecs raised the first great ceremonial complexes and carved the famous colossal heads: portraits of their rulers sculpted in enormous basalt blocks that could stand three meters tall and weigh more than twenty tons, hauled from the Sierra de los Tuxtlas dozens of kilometers away. Seventeen of these heads have been found.
Beyond their monumental art, the Olmecs laid down many of the cultural foundations that later peoples would inherit: an incipient system of writing and numbering, the ritual calendar, the ball game, the cult of the jaguar and the serpent, and a religion and a hierarchical political organization. Their influence and their goods —jade, obsidian— spread across much of Mesoamerica through wide exchange networks.
By around 400 BC the great Olmec centers had been abandoned for reasons still debated, but their legacy endured. The Mexica, almost three thousand years later, still regarded those lands as a mythical region of origin, and modern archaeologists recognize in the Olmecs the common trunk from which Mexico's classic civilizations grew.
The so-called Classic period (roughly 250-900 AD) was the golden age of the great Mesoamerican cities. On the central highlands rose Teotihuacan, the 'City of the Gods', whose peak between the second and sixth centuries AD made it one of the largest cities in the world, with between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand inhabitants spread across a planned layout along the Avenue of the Dead. Its colossal Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, and the temple of the Feathered Serpent, presided over a state whose commercial and cultural influence reached as far as the distant Maya lands. Its mysterious collapse, around 550-650 AD, left a city in ruins that centuries later the Mexica would contemplate with religious awe.
In the southeast, Maya civilization reached its greatest refinement in dozens of city-states in the jungles of Chiapas, the Petén and the Yucatán peninsula, among them Palenque, Calakmul, Tikal, Yaxchilán, Copán, Uxmal and, later, Chichén Itzá. The Maya developed the most complete hieroglyphic writing in the Americas, an astronomy able to predict eclipses, the mathematical concept of zero and a calendar of extraordinary precision. Between the eighth and ninth centuries, many of the great southern cities were abandoned in the so-called Maya 'collapse', attributed to droughts, wars, overexploitation and political crises.
In the valleys of Oaxaca, around 500 BC the Zapotecs founded Monte Albán on an artificially leveled mountain, with its monumental plaza, its polychrome tombs and its writing, reaching its height between 300 and 700 AD with some twenty thousand inhabitants. Later the Mixtecs, masters of goldwork and of the codices, would occupy much of the region. This classic mosaic left Mexico its most dazzling archaeological heritage.
After the decline of Teotihuacan, central Mexico entered the Postclassic period, marked by more militaristic societies. Around the tenth to twelfth centuries Tula flourished, the Toltec capital, famous for its Atlantes, colossal stone warriors that crowned a pyramid. Later peoples admired the Toltecs as the inventors of the arts, of wisdom and of civilized life; to be 'Toltec' was to be an artist and a sage. Around Tula was woven the myth of Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent, the exiled priest-king who promised to return from the east, a legend that would echo tragically during the conquest.
Around the year 1200, Tula fell and the highlands broke apart into numerous rival lordships. Into that scene burst the Mexica, or Aztecs, a Nahua people who had come, according to their own tradition, from mythical Aztlán. After long wanderings and humiliations as mercenaries for other lordships, around 1325 they founded their city, México-Tenochtitlan, on an islet in Lake Texcoco, at the place where —according to prophecy— they found an eagle devouring a serpent on a prickly pear cactus, the emblem that survives on the national coat of arms.
In less than two centuries the Mexica went from tributaries to masters of the valley. Through the Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan, formed in 1428 after defeating Azcapotzalco, they built a vast tributary empire that dominated much of Mesoamerica from their dazzling capital, crisscrossed by canals and causeways, with markets, temples and perhaps more inhabitants than any European city of the time.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Mexica empire, ruled by the tlatoani Moctezuma II, was the dominant power of Mesoamerica, feared and hated by the peoples subjected to its tribute and to the wars waged to capture victims for sacrifice. Tenochtitlan, with its Templo Mayor dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tláloc, was the religious, political and commercial heart of that world. But beneath the surface of Mexica power seethed resentments that a foreigner would know how to exploit.
In February 1519, Hernán Cortés, a native of Extremadura, sailed from Cuba with little more than five hundred men and landed on the coast of what he named the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. He received as interpreter and adviser La Malinche, an Indigenous woman who was key to the enterprise. Taking advantage of internal rivalries, Cortés sealed a decisive alliance with the Tlaxcaltecs, sworn enemies of the Mexica, and advanced towards the highlands. He entered Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519 and took Moctezuma prisoner. The tension exploded in 1520: during Cortés's absence the Spaniards carried out a massacre at the Templo Mayor, Moctezuma died and the invaders had to flee the city in the bloody 'Noche Triste', the night of June 30, 1520.
Cortés regrouped his forces with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies while smallpox, brought by the Europeans, decimated the population and killed the new tlatoani Cuitláhuac. The final siege, with brigantines launched onto the lake, lasted seventy-five days. On August 13, 1521, after fierce resistance led by the young Cuauhtémoc, Tenochtitlan fell. With it ended the Mexica empire, and there began three centuries of Spanish rule and the birth of a new world, born of violence and of mestizaje.
On the ruins of Tenochtitlan rose Mexico City, capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, formally created in 1535 as the jewel of the Spanish crown. For almost three centuries, New Spain was the richest and most populous territory of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Its engine was silver: the strikes at Zacatecas (1546), Guanajuato, Taxco, Pachuca and San Luis Potosí produced a colossal wealth that financed the monarchy, drove world trade and was linked, along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, to the distant mines of the north.
Evangelization, led by Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and later Jesuits, profoundly transformed the Indigenous world. From the fusion of Catholicism with native beliefs came a unique syncretism whose supreme expression was devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose apparition to the Indigenous man Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 became the spiritual and identity symbol of Mexico. The friars also preserved Indigenous languages and memories, and founded the first university on the continent in 1551.
Society in New Spain was rigidly hierarchical and racial: at the top, the peninsulares (born in Spain); below them, the criollos (of Spanish descent but born in America), increasingly resentful of their exclusion from high office; and at the base, an enormous world of mestizos, Indigenous people —subject to tribute and forced labor— and enslaved Africans. That complex caste system, together with the accumulated grievances of the criollos and the spread of Enlightenment ideas, sowed the tensions that would explode at the start of the nineteenth century.
The crisis of the Spanish monarchy after the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 lit the fuse. In the early hours of September 16, 1810, in the town of Dolores, in Guanajuato, the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla issued the so-called 'Grito de Dolores', calling on the people to rise against bad government. A multitude of peasants, miners and Indigenous people joined the insurrection, which took Guanajuato after the bloody assault on the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, where a miner nicknamed 'El Pípila' is said to have set fire to the door. Pursued, Hidalgo was captured and shot in 1811.
The struggle continued under José María Morelos, a priest of military and political genius who controlled much of the south, convened the Congress of Anáhuac in 1813 and proclaimed the 'Sentimientos de la Nación', a program of independence, abolition of slavery and equality. Morelos too was captured and shot, in 1815, and the movement was reduced to the guerrilla warfare of leaders such as Vicente Guerrero in the southern mountains.
Independence came about, paradoxically, through a conservative turn. The criollo officer Agustín de Iturbide, sent to fight the insurgents, came to terms with Guerrero and proclaimed in 1821 the Plan of Iguala, which guaranteed religion, independence and union under the Army of the Three Guarantees. After the Treaty of Córdoba, the Army of the Three Guarantees entered Mexico City in triumph on September 27, 1821, sealing independence. Shortly afterwards Iturbide briefly crowned himself emperor before being overthrown, and in 1824 the first republican and federal Constitution was enacted.
Independent Mexico lived through half a century of instability. Amid coups, military pronunciamientos and the struggle between federalists and centralists, the recurring figure was General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who held the presidency on many occasions. Internal weakness, permanent bankruptcy and regional divisions left the young country exposed to foreign powers and to the expansionism of its neighbor to the north.
The greatest problem was Texas. Colonized by Anglo-Americans, the province rebelled and declared its independence in 1836, after Santa Anna's defeat at San Jacinto. Its subsequent annexation by the United States in 1845 precipitated war. Between 1846 and 1848, US armies invaded the country from the north and from the Gulf, took Veracruz and went on to occupy Mexico City in 1847, heroically defended, according to tradition, by the 'Niños Héroes' cadets of Chapultepec Castle.
Defeat was sealed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848. Mexico lost more than half its territory —present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and parts of other states, more than two million square kilometers— in exchange for fifteen million dollars. That amputation, the greatest catastrophe in the nation's history, left a deep wound and hastened the debate on the need to reform and modernize the country.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, a generation of liberals led by the Zapotec lawyer Benito Juárez undertook a radical transformation of the country. The Laws of the Reforma, enacted between 1855 and 1860, sought to separate Church and State, nationalize the property of the clergy, establish the civil registry and civil marriage, and create a secular republic of citizens equal before the law. The conservatives answered with arms in the War of the Reforma (1858-1861), from which the liberals emerged victorious, and in 1861 Juárez entered the capital as president.
Defeated on the battlefield, the conservatives sought European backing. Taking advantage of the suspension of payments on the Mexican debt, Napoleon III of France sent an army that, despite the famous Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, ended up occupying the country and imposing the Second Mexican Empire. In 1864 came Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg, who —to the bewilderment of the conservatives— turned out to be a ruler of liberal ideas.
Juárez, with his itinerant government and the support of the United States after the end of its civil war, held out until the withdrawal of the French troops left Maximilian to his fate. The emperor was captured and shot on the Cerro de las Campanas, in Querétaro, in June 1867. With the Republic restored, Juárez —the 'Benemérito de las Américas', the first Indigenous president on the continent— consolidated the secular state before dying in 1872, leaving a founding legacy for modern Mexico.
In 1876, General Porfirio Díaz, a native of Oaxaca and a hero of the fight against the French, came to power through a coup and governed Mexico, directly or through a stand-in, for more than three decades. The Porfiriato brought unprecedented stability and economic growth. The rail network grew from some 640 kilometers in 1876 to more than nineteen thousand in 1910; massive foreign investment arrived, along with industry, banking, the telegraph, electricity and streetcars. Mexico presented itself to the world as a prosperous and orderly nation under the positivist motto of 'order and progress'.
The social price, however, was enormous. Modernization benefited an elite of landowners, businessmen and foreign investors, while the vast majority of the population was left on the margins. Peasant communities were stripped of their communal lands; by 1910 a handful of families owned tens of millions of hectares and most peasants worked as indebted peons on the great haciendas. Political repression, the absence of free elections and labor exploitation —symbolized by ferociously repressed strikes such as Cananea and Río Blanco— produced an explosive discontent.
Díaz, by then an old man, had promised in a 1908 interview to allow free elections, but he clung to power. When the opposition candidate Francisco I. Madero was jailed during the 1910 campaign, the pressure cooker of thirty years blew. The Porfiriato, which had modernized the economy on a base of deep injustice, would collapse in a matter of months before the revolutionary uprising.
On November 20, 1910, following the Plan of San Luis proclaimed by Madero, the Mexican Revolution broke out, the first great social revolution of the twentieth century. The uprising spread quickly: in the north, Pascual Orozco and Francisco 'Pancho' Villa took Ciudad Juárez; in the south, Emiliano Zapata raised the peasants of Morelos under the banner of 'Tierra y Libertad', land and liberty. Díaz resigned and left for exile in 1911, and Madero was elected president.
But the conflict had barely begun. In 1913, General Victoriano Huerta betrayed and murdered Madero in the coup known as the 'Decena Trágica'. A broad coalition rose against the usurper: Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, proclaimed the Plan of Guadalupe and led the Constitutionalist Army, with Villa and his legendary División del Norte and Álvaro Obregón as its great military chiefs. Decisive battles such as the Taking of Zacatecas (1914), led by Villa, precipitated Huerta's fall.
With the revolution triumphant, the victors split. Villistas and Zapatistas, meeting at the Convention of Aguascalientes in 1914, broke with the Carrancistas, and the country sank into a new and bloody civil war from which Carranza and Obregón's Constitutionalists emerged the winners. The conflict, which cost close to a million lives, culminated in the enactment of the Constitution of 1917, one of the most advanced of its time, which enshrined land reform, labor rights, secular education and the nation's ownership of the subsoil. Zapata would be treacherously assassinated in 1919 and Carranza in 1920, closing the armed phase of the Revolution.
From the ashes of the Revolution came, in 1929, a party conceived to institutionalize power and pacify the factions: the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, founded by Plutarco Elías Calles, which after successive refoundings would become the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This party would govern Mexico without interruption for more than seventy years, in a hegemonic single-party system with an all-powerful president who changed every six years, with no reelection.
The high point of revolutionary nationalism was the government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). Cárdenas handed out millions of hectares to peasants through the ejido, organized workers and peasants within the party and, above all, on March 18, 1938 expropriated the oil industry from foreign companies, creating Pemex in an act of sovereignty celebrated with popular fervor. He also opened the doors to refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
Between 1940 and 1970, Mexico lived the so-called 'Mexican miracle': three decades of rapid industrial growth, accelerated urbanization and relative stability. But development was uneven and the political system grew ever more authoritarian. Its darkest face was engraved in the massacre of students in the Tlatelolco plaza, in Mexico City, on October 2, 1968, a few days before the Olympic Games, when the army fired on a peaceful demonstration and left hundreds dead. That tragedy marked the beginning of the long erosion of the PRI regime.
The closing decades of the twentieth century eroded the old regime. The debt crisis of 1982, the perception of fraud in the presidential elections of 1988 and the devastating Mexico City earthquake of September 19, 1985 —which left thousands dead and exposed official incompetence against the solidarity of civil society— undermined confidence in the system. Economic opening culminated with the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada on January 1, 1994, the same day the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose in arms in Chiapas demanding rights for Indigenous peoples.
The year 2000 was a milestone: the victory of Vicente Fox, of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), ended more than seven decades of PRI hegemony and ushered in democratic alternation. The twenty-first century, however, brought a devastating challenge: the escalation of violence linked to drug trafficking, made worse after the 'war on drugs' launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2006, which left hundreds of thousands dead and disappeared and transformed life across broad regions of the country.
In 2018, the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his Morena movement opened the era of the self-styled 'Fourth Transformation', a nationalist left-wing project. In 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected the first woman president in the history of Mexico. The second-largest economy in Latin America, a cultural and tourism giant proud of its Indigenous and colonial heritage, contemporary Mexico still wrestles between its enormous cultural and human wealth and the deep challenges of inequality, migration, security and the building of a full rule of law.
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The name Aguascalientes comes from the abundant hot springs that welled up in the area. Before the conquest, the region was frontier land between the settled cultures of the center and the semi-nomadic Chichimec peoples —Guachichiles and others— who dominated the arid north and put up fierce resistance to the Spanish advance during the long Chichimec War of the sixteenth century.
The discovery of the fabulous silver of Zacatecas turned this district into a strategic point on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the great route linking the northern mines with Mexico City. To protect the silver convoys from Indigenous attacks, the crown promoted the founding of towns and presidios along the road.
The town of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de las Aguas Calientes was founded in 1575 as a point of defense and rest on the silver route. During the colonial period it prospered thanks to farming, livestock and its strategic position, and it remained administratively tied to Zacatecas.
After independence, the history of Aguascalientes was marked by its struggle for autonomy from neighboring Zacatecas. In 1857 it was finally established as a free and sovereign state of the federation, consolidating an identity of its own as one of the smallest entities in the country.
Aguascalientes is famous for the Feria Nacional de San Marcos, considered the most important fair and one of the oldest in Mexico, held every spring since the nineteenth century around the feast of Saint Mark. Headline bullfights, cockfights, music, livestock shows, trade and street parties turn the city, for weeks, into a great national meeting point.
The fair, whose roots lie in the colonial trade fairs and in the famous Jardín de San Marcos, is today an economic engine and a symbol of the state's identity, and it draws millions of visitors from all over the country.
The city's most famous historical episode took place in 1914, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. After the fall of the usurper Victoriano Huerta, the main revolutionary factions —Villistas, Zapatistas and Carrancistas— met at the Sovereign Convention of Aguascalientes in an attempt to agree on the country's course and avoid a new war.
The Convention, which declared its own sovereignty and appointed a government, ended in a break between the followers of Villa and Zapata on one side and those of Carranza on the other, precipitating a new and bloody phase of civil war. That conclave remains one of the key and most dramatic moments of the Revolution.
Aguascalientes is the birthplace of José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), the brilliant engraver whose satirical 'calaveras' and popular prints decisively influenced twentieth-century Mexican art. From his burin came the famous 'Calavera Garbancera', which Diego Rivera would popularize as 'La Catrina', today a universal icon of the Day of the Dead.
The city honors his legacy with museums devoted to engraving and to Posada himself, and popular art along with traditional drawn-thread work and embroidery form part of the cultural heritage of Aguascalientes.
In recent decades Aguascalientes has become one of the most prosperous and industrialized states in Mexico, with a powerful automotive and auto-parts industry that has turned it into a hub of investment and employment in the northern Bajío.
Despite that economic dynamism, the city keeps the calm, orderly feel of a provincial capital, with a historic center of plazas, gardens and churches, a mild climate and a quality of life that place it among the best-rated entities in the country.
The Baja California peninsula was inhabited for millennia by peoples such as the Kumiai (Kumeyaay), Cucapá, Pai Pai and Kiliwa, hunter-gatherers admirably adapted to one of the most arid territories on the continent, between the desert, the sierra and the coast. These communities developed a deep knowledge of their surroundings and a rich universe of oral traditions, songs and paintings.
Some of their descendants still keep their languages and traditions today in small inland communities, and they are among the Indigenous peoples with the fewest speakers in the country, which makes preserving their heritage especially valuable.
European colonization arrived late, and by the hand of the religious missions. First the Jesuits and, after their expulsion in 1767, the Franciscans and Dominicans founded a chain of missions along the peninsula during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was from these Baja California missions that friar Junípero Serra set out to colonize Alta California.
Some of those missions gave rise to today's towns. The missionary enterprise, however, came at a tragic cost: the epidemics brought by the Europeans decimated the Indigenous population of the peninsula.
After the war with the United States (1846-1848), the border was fixed on its present line: Alta California was lost and Baja remained Mexican. During the Revolution, in 1911, the region lived the brief episode of the Magonista uprising, which went so far as to occupy Tijuana and Mexicali.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Prohibition in the United States turned Tijuana into a destination of leisure, casinos, cantinas and entertainment for Californians, laying the foundations of its border and tourist vocation. The city grew from a modest settlement into a large city.
From the middle of the twentieth century, the growth of the maquiladora industry, drawn by the closeness of the United States, transformed Mexicali —named the state capital— and Tijuana into large industrial cities that took in migrants from all over Mexico. Baja California attained the rank of free and sovereign state of the federation in 1952.
Today the region forms, together with San Diego, one of the most dynamic cross-border metropolitan areas in the world, with an intense daily flow of people and goods through the busiest border crossings on the planet.
The Valle de Guadalupe, near Ensenada, has established itself as the main wine-growing region of Mexico, producing around 70% of the country's wine. Its vineyards, signature wineries, boutique hotels and an acclaimed food scene have made it a wine destination of international fame.
Ensenada, a fishing port on the Pacific and home of the Fiesta de la Vendimia, is also the cradle of Baja Californian cooking and of creations such as the famous fish taco, today a culinary emblem of the whole region.
Tijuana, the state's most populous city, has undergone a remarkable cultural and culinary revival in recent decades. The 'Baja Med' culinary movement, which blends local ingredients from the sea and the countryside with Mediterranean and Asian influences, has put it on the world map of good eating.
With a vibrant scene of street art, music, craft beer and border creativity, Baja California today combines its character as a gateway to the United States with a cultural identity of its own, cosmopolitan and in full ferment.
The southern half of the peninsula was home to the Guaycura, Pericú and Cochimí peoples, communities of fishers and gatherers who lived in one of the most arid and isolated settings on the continent. Their most astonishing legacy is the rock paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco, one of the largest bodies of rock art in the world, with enormous human and animal figures up to several meters tall painted in red and black, declared a World Heritage Site.
These monumental works, attributed to the ancestors of the Cochimí, are still wrapped in mystery and bear witness to a complex spiritual life in the middle of the desert.
Colonization began in 1697, when the Jesuit Juan María de Salvatierra founded the mission of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, the first permanent mission of the Californias and the 'head and mother' of all those that would later spread north as far as Alta California.
For decades the Jesuits ran the peninsula almost as a territory of their own, founding missions along oases and streams. After their expulsion in 1767, Franciscans and Dominicans carried on the enterprise, but epidemics decimated the Indigenous population and many missions fell into decline.
For most of its history, Baja California Sur was a remote and thinly populated territory, with the city of La Paz as its main port on the Sea of Cortés, tied to the pearl fishing that made it famous in colonial times.
The isolation lasted well into the twentieth century, until the building of the Transpeninsular highway in the seventies finally connected the region with the rest of the country. The territory only reached the rank of free and sovereign state in 1974, together with Quintana Roo, making it one of the youngest in Mexico.
The Sea of Cortés, named by the explorer Jacques Cousteau 'the aquarium of the world' for its extraordinary biodiversity, and the Pacific lagoons where the gray whales arrive every winter to mate and calve, made Baja California Sur a unique nature destination, protected in several areas declared World Heritage Sites.
In lagoons such as Ojo de Liebre and San Ignacio you can witness one of the most moving spectacles on the planet: gray whales coming right up to the boats. Sea lions, whale sharks and bird colonies complete an exceptional natural sanctuary.
At the southern tip of the peninsula, Los Cabos —the pairing of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo— was transformed from the seventies onwards into one of the country's great luxury tourism hubs. Its emblematic stone Arch, where the Sea of Cortés meets the Pacific Ocean, along with golf courses, resorts, marinas and sport fishing, draws visitors from all over the world.
That development turned the far south into the economic engine of the state, though with the tensions that come with rapid growth in a fragile desert environment.
La Paz, the state capital, keeps a quieter, more authentic character, with its malecón, its sunsets and its closeness to paradises such as Espíritu Santo island, a World Heritage Site. Loreto, the old mission capital, is today a peaceful Pueblo Mágico facing a marine park of crystal-clear waters.
From watching whales and whale sharks to diving and kayaking, the sea is the great protagonist of life in Baja California Sur, in a state that combines international tourism with a deep bond to its nature and its mission history.
The territory of Campeche was one of the great centers of Maya civilization. In the south, amid the Petén jungle, Calakmul flourished, one of the largest cities of the Classic period and a great rival of Tikal, which came to lead the powerful 'Snake Kingdom' (Kaan) and to dominate much of the Maya lowlands.
Its imposing pyramids, some of the tallest in the Maya world, rise today above a sea of jungle inside an enormous biosphere reserve declared a World Heritage Site, home to jaguars, tapirs and howler monkeys. Other sites such as Edzná, Becán and the Río Bec route complete an extremely rich archaeological heritage.
The city of San Francisco de Campeche was founded by the Spanish in 1540 on the old Maya settlement of Can Pech, and became the main port of the Yucatán Peninsula, the trading gateway of the whole region to the sea.
Out through its port to Europe went precious woods, the valuable dyewood (palo de Campeche, or logwood, used to dye textiles), wax, salt and other products, which made it a rich and coveted place.
The wealth of the port made it a constant target of attacks by English, French and Dutch pirates and privateers, who sacked it repeatedly during the 16th and 17th centuries, among them legendary figures of Caribbean piracy.
To defend it, the Crown surrounded the city with an imposing hexagonal wall with bastions and forts, built mainly in the 17th century. That set of fortifications, one of the best preserved in the Americas, together with its beautiful historic center of colorful houses, was declared a World Heritage Site.
After independence, the economy of Campeche revolved around forestry and, like the rest of the peninsula, it lived through the henequen boom in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the agave fiber known as 'green gold', used to make rope and sacks.
Campeche, which during the colonial period and the first decades of independence formed part of Yucatán, broke away and was constituted as a state of its own in 1863, defining its distinct identity within the peninsula.
The great modern economic turn came with the discovery of enormous oil deposits in the Campeche Sound, in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. From the 1970s on, the region became one of the pillars of national oil production, with Ciudad del Carmen as the center of Pemex activity.
Oil transformed the state's economy and its role within the country, although it also raised environmental challenges and the problem of dependence on a resource subject to the swings of the market.
Today Campeche combines its extraordinary Maya and colonial past with its status as a destination for cultural and nature tourism, quieter and less crowded than other spots on the peninsula.
Its walled capital, the archaeological sites in the jungle, the colonial towns of the Camino Real, the biosphere reserves of Calakmul and Los Petenes, and a distinctive cuisine —with dishes such as pan de cazón— make Campeche one of the least known and most authentic gems of southeastern Mexico.
Chiapas was one of the great stages of Maya civilization. Palenque, in the northern jungle, reached its peak in the 7th century under the ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, 'Pakal the Great', whose tomb, found in 1952 inside the Temple of the Inscriptions with its famous carved slab and its jade mask, is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the Americas.
The refined architecture, the stucco reliefs and the inscriptions of Palenque place it among the summits of Maya art. Other cities of Chiapas such as Yaxchilán, Bonampak —with its extraordinary polychrome murals— and Toniná preserve stelae and paintings of exceptional beauty.
Unlike other regions where the pre-Hispanic heritage was reduced to ruins, in Chiapas Maya culture is still alive. Peoples such as the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Ch'ol, Tojolabal and Lacandón preserve their languages, their dress, their worldview and their traditions.
In communities such as San Juan Chamula or Zinacantán a unique religious syncretism is practiced, mixing Catholicism with ancestral rituals. This living cultural wealth is one of the greatest treasures of the state and of all Mexico.
During the colonial period, Chiapas did not belong to New Spain but to the Captaincy General of Guatemala. When Central America became independent, the province had to decide its fate, and in 1824, through a plebiscite, the majority of its towns voted to be annexed to Mexico, defining the country's southern border.
That Guatemalan origin marks the identity of Chiapas. San Cristóbal de las Casas, founded in 1528 and the colonial capital, preserves one of the most beautiful historic centers in the country; it takes its name from Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, the famous bishop who defended the indigenous peoples.
On January 1, 1994, the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), made up mostly of indigenous people, rose up in arms and occupied San Cristóbal and other municipal seats, demanding 'land, shelter, health, education, democracy and justice' for the native peoples.
The movement, led by the enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos, had enormous worldwide repercussion and placed the historical debt owed to indigenous peoples at the center of the debate. After brief fighting and a ceasefire, Zapatismo turned into a political movement of community autonomy that endures to this day.
Chiapas is one of the states of greatest natural wealth in Mexico. The imposing Sumidero Canyon, with walls of more than a thousand meters rising above the Grijalva River, is one of its emblems and appears on the state's coat of arms. The Agua Azul and Misol-Ha waterfalls, with their turquoise waters, and the Montebello lakes, with their dozens of colored lagoons, complete a spectacular landscape.
The Lacandon Jungle, one of the last great tropical forests in the country, and the El Triunfo reserve hold an exceptional biodiversity, with the quetzal among its most celebrated inhabitants.
Chiapas is one of the main coffee producers in Mexico, grown in the mountains of the Soconusco and other regions, as well as of cacao, the basis of an ancestral chocolate-making tradition. Its cuisine and its indigenous markets are an essential part of its appeal.
Today the state is one of the country's great tourist destinations for its combination of Maya archaeology, colonial cities, lush nature and living cultures, although it still faces deep challenges of poverty and inequality, among the greatest in Mexico.
The sierra and the desert of Chihuahua are the ancestral home of the Rarámuri or Tarahumara people, famous around the world for their long-distance running culture —they cover extraordinary distances across the canyons— and for preserving their traditional way of life in one of the most rugged territories in Mexico.
In the north of the state, the enigmatic Paquimé (Casas Grandes) culture developed, around the years 1000-1400, a remarkable multi-story adobe architecture, a sophisticated water system and a trade network that reached as far as the present-day southwestern United States and the Pacific coasts. Its ruins are a World Heritage Site.
Spanish colonization arrived late and with difficulty on this frontier. Drawn by silver, the Spanish founded mining settlements and presidios, but their advance ran into the tenacious resistance of the Apaches and other northern peoples, who turned the region into a war zone for centuries.
The town of Chihuahua was founded in the 18th century as a mining center. It was in the church of Chihuahua that, after his capture, the father of the nation, Miguel Hidalgo, was executed by firing squad in 1811, and the city preserves his memory.
Chihuahua was one of the central stages of the Mexican Revolution. From its lands came the legendary División del Norte commanded by Francisco 'Pancho' Villa, whose daring cavalry charges and military blows —such as the taking of Ciudad Juárez in 1911— made him a popular hero and one of the great figures of the conflict.
In 1916, after Villa's attack on the United States town of Columbus, the U.S. Army launched General Pershing's failed Punitive Expedition across the north of the state, without ever capturing him. Villa's house-museum in the state capital keeps the memory of those years alive.
The state's greatest natural attraction is the Barrancas del Cobre, the Copper Canyon, a vast canyon system in the Sierra Tarahumara that is more extensive and, at several points, deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Its vertiginous landscapes, its rivers and its Rarámuri culture make it one of the great nature destinations in Mexico.
The famous Chepe train (Chihuahua al Pacífico) crosses this spectacular landscape along hundreds of kilometers, bridges and tunnels, on one of the most impressive railway journeys in the world, with towns such as Creel and Divisadero as the gateway to the sierra.
Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso (Texas), is the most populated city in the state and one of the country's great centers of the maquiladora industry, as well as a key border crossing between Mexico and the United States.
That border condition has given it enormous economic and demographic dynamism, but it also turned it, in the first decades of the 21st century, into a painful symbol of the violence linked to drug trafficking, a challenge the city has been facing in its attempt at recovery.
Chihuahua is also a land of great desert plains and of a powerful cattle industry that made its beef and its northern dishes famous. Since the 1920s, Mennonite communities settled in its valleys, introducing a prosperous agriculture and a renowned cheese industry —the famous chihuahua or menonita cheese.
From the dunes of Samalayuca to the forests of the sierra, by way of the mythic landscape of the western and the emerging vineyards, the largest state in Mexico offers a geographic and cultural diversity worthy of its immense surface.
Coahuila, deep in the northern desert, was inhabited by nomadic peoples of the Coahuiltecan group and by other hunter-gatherer groups who resisted the Spanish advance for a long time. The region was a hard frontier, battered for centuries by Apache and Comanche raids.
These native peoples left their mark in rock paintings and in place names, but they were largely displaced or wiped out by colonization and epidemics, in one of the most traumatic processes in the history of the north.
Saltillo, founded in 1577, is the capital and one of the oldest cities in the north of the country, famous for its multicolored sarapes, woven blankets that became a symbol of Mexican craftwork. Beside it, the Tlaxcalan town of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala, settled by allied Tlaxcalan people, helped to colonize and pacify the region.
Coahuila was the starting point for the colonization of Texas, which during the colonial period and the first decades of independence formed part of the same state of Coahuila y Texas, until Texas separated in 1836.
Coahuila played a decisive part in the Mexican Revolution. Its governor, Venustiano Carranza, refused to recognize the usurper Victoriano Huerta and in 1913, at the hacienda of Guadalupe, proclaimed the Plan de Guadalupe, which gave rise to the Constitutionalist Army and to the movement that would set the country's institutional course.
Carranza would reach the presidency and head the Constituent Congress that enacted the Constitution of 1917, still in force today. The state takes pride in having been the cradle of that founding current of modern Mexico.
In the middle of the desert, Parras de la Fuente is an oasis of springs, walnut trees and vineyards, and the cradle of winemaking on the American continent: Casa Madero, the oldest winery in the Americas, has been working there since 1597 and still produces award-winning wines.
This green enclave in the middle of the semi-desert, with its irrigation channels and its haciendas, is a Pueblo Mágico that combines colonial history, winemaking tradition and a singular microclimate that sets it apart from the arid country around it.
Coahuila holds unique natural treasures. The region of Cuatro Ciénegas preserves hundreds of pools of crystal-clear water with life forms —the stromatolites— considered windows onto the origin of life on Earth, an ecosystem so singular that it has even been studied for space research.
The Coahuila deserts are also one of Mexico's main dinosaur fossil beds, with finds of unique species displayed in museums such as the one at Rincón Colorado, making the state a national benchmark in paleontology.
Coahuila combines its natural wealth with a first-rate industrial economy. The Comarca Lagunera —shared with Durango— is a major farming and dairy hub; the Monclova region is home to steelmaking; and the coal basin is the country's main source of coal, though with a history of tragic mining accidents.
With a powerful automotive and manufacturing industry, and cities such as Torreón and Saltillo, Coahuila is today one of the most industrialized and prosperous states in northern Mexico.
The pre-Hispanic cultural development of Colima has been divided into seven archaeological phases —Capacha, Ortices, Comala, Colima, Armería, Chanal and Periquillos— running from the Preclassic to the Postclassic. The oldest, the Capacha culture, flourished around 1500 BC and produced some of the earliest pottery in all of western Mexico, with tripod vessels and sculptural forms of astonishing modernity.
The most characteristic feature of the region was the tradition of shaft tombs, shared with the present-day states of Jalisco, Nayarit and Michoacán between roughly 300 BC and AD 600. These were vertical pits dug into the hard volcanic tepetate, descending to one or several burial chambers where the dead were laid with grave goods of extraordinary quality. From those tombs come the famous figurines of plump xoloitzcuintle dogs, considered guides of the soul on its journey to the underworld, which have become the artistic emblem of Colima.
Unlike the great cities of central and southern Mesoamerica, the West raised no monumental pyramids and developed no writing, but it bequeathed a naturalistic funerary art, warm and full of everyday life —warriors, musicians, women, couples, domestic scenes— that is today one of the jewels of the country's archaeology museums.
When the Spanish arrived, the territory was dominated by Nahua-speaking lordships grouped around the chiefdom of Colima, which put up stubborn resistance. After several failed attempts, the Villa de San Sebastián de Colima was founded in 1523 by Gonzalo de Sandoval, a lieutenant of Hernán Cortés, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the west of New Spain.
Under the viceroyalty, Colima was a prosperous but out-of-the-way district, given over to tropical farming —cacao, salt, coconut and, above all, the coconut palm brought from the Philippines, from which the spirit known as 'vino de cocos' or tuba was distilled. Its closeness to the port of Manzanillo tied it to the route of the Manila Galleon, the Nao de China, which for two and a half centuries joined Acapulco and the Philippines and brought Asian influences into local life and cooking.
For centuries Colima belonged to the jurisdiction of Nueva Galicia and of the audiencia of Guadalajara, always keeping the character of a small territory neatly bounded by the sea, the sierra and the volcanoes, a trait that would mark its later history as one of the most compact entities in Mexico.
After Independence, the federal Constitution of 1824 recognized Colima as a territory of the federation, with its own administration but without full status as a state. Over the following decades its condition swung between territorial autonomy and dependence on neighboring entities, in the political to and fro of nineteenth-century Mexico.
The triumph of liberalism settled its rank: with the rise of the liberals in the mid-1850s, Colima was raised to the category of free and sovereign state, a condition ratified by the Constitution of 1857. Manuel Álvarez was named first constitutional governor, sealing the autonomous political identity of one of the smallest entities in the country.
Colima thus entered national life as a state modest in size but singular in character, proud of its own history and of its standing as Mexico's balcony over the Pacific Ocean.
Colima is dominated by one of the most active volcanoes in North America: the Volcán de Fuego de Colima, which together with the neighboring Nevado de Colima and the eroded Cántaro makes up the Colima Volcanic Complex, at the western end of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Although it carries the name of the state, much of its cone in fact rises in the territory of neighboring Jalisco.
Over the last five centuries the volcano has been the protagonist of more than thirty eruptive episodes, with notable eruptions in 1818, 1869, 1903 and 1913, and an intense recent activity that forced evacuations and kept the settlements on its slopes on edge. Its smoking outline presides over the landscape and the identity of Colima.
To the volcanic threat is added the seismic one: the region, facing the subduction zone of the Cocos plate, has suffered great earthquakes, such as that of 1941, that of 1973 —which devastated Tecomán— and the Manzanillo one of 1995, among the largest on Mexico's Pacific coast. Living in the shadow of the Volcán de Fuego has forged in the people of Colima a culture of coexistence with the force of the earth.
The municipality of Comala, a village of whitewashed houses at the foot of the volcano, gave its name and its atmosphere to one of the peaks of literature in the Spanish language: 'Pedro Páramo' (1955), by the Jalisco-born writer Juan Rulfo. In that novel Comala is a ghostly town, inhabited by the voices of the dead, which has become a universal symbol of memory, solitude and rural Mexico.
Literary fame turned Comala into a place of cultural pilgrimage. Its white arcades, its cafés and its quiet square earned it the official title of Pueblo Mágico, and today it is one of the state's great tourist attractions, where Rulfo's fiction blurs into the real landscape.
That crossing of literature and territory has given Colima a cultural reach far greater than its size, turning a small town on the Pacific into a landmark of Spanish American letters.
The port of Manzanillo, formally opened to foreign trade in 1825, is today the economic heart of Colima and the main container port on the whole Mexican Pacific. More than ninety percent of the containerized cargo of the country's Pacific side passes across its docks, and more than two dozen shipping lines call there regularly, connecting it with Asia, the Americas and the world.
Heir to the old colonial seafaring calling —when these coasts were tied to the route of the Nao de China—, Manzanillo combines its condition as a great logistics platform with that of a tourist destination of golden beaches, famous for sailfish fishing and for resorts such as Las Hadas, a film location and a postcard of Mexican tourism in the seventies and eighties.
That double character, industrial and touristic, makes Manzanillo the engine of a state that, despite its small size, holds a strategic place in Mexico's international trade.
With one of the smallest areas in the country, Colima has managed to place itself among the entities with the best indicators of human development, income and education in Mexico, supported by port trade, tropical farming —lime, coconut, banana, coffee— and a beach and nature tourism in full growth.
Its capital, the city of Colima, keeps a quiet air of squares, palm trees and provincial architecture, and is home to cultural institutions and to the prestigious Universidad de Colima. The contrast between the serenity of the city and the latent force of the volcano defines the temper of its inhabitants.
Between the Volcán de Fuego, the myth of Comala, the shaft tombs and the bustle of Manzanillo, Colima shows that the standing of a territory is not measured by its size, but by the density of its history and its culture.
Before the conquest, the vast territory of Durango was inhabited by indigenous peoples of the north —Tepehuanes, Xiximes, Acaxees, Huichols and semi-nomadic Chichimec groups— adapted to an extreme landscape running from the forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the semi-desert plains of the east. These communities put up a long resistance to the Spanish advance, with uprisings such as the great Tepehuán rebellion of 1616, one of the bloodiest in the north of New Spain.
The region is famous for its desert wildlife, and most especially for the Durango scorpion, whose feared venom turned the creature into a popular symbol of the state and of its capital, to the point of giving its people their nickname. The image of the scorpion is part of local folklore and identity.
That condition of hard, frontier land —between the settled world of the center and the untamed peoples of the far north— marked from the start the tough character and the mining and cattle-raising vocation of Durango.
Durango's colonial destiny was tied to mining. In 1552, an expedition headed by Ginés Vázquez de Mercado was searching for a fabulous hill of silver and found instead a mountain of almost pure iron, which was christened Cerro del Mercado, one of the largest iron deposits on the continent and still today an emblem of the city.
The Basque conquistador Francisco de Ibarra traveled and organized the region, founding on July 8, 1563 the Villa de Durango —named in memory of a town in his native Vizcaya— on the Guadiana Valley. Ibarra also put together the enormous province of Nueva Vizcaya, which took in the present-day Durango and Chihuahua and parts of Sonora, Sinaloa and Coahuila, with the Villa de Durango as its capital.
For almost three centuries, Durango was the administrative and religious center of that immense territory in the north of New Spain, an episcopal see and a key point on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the great silver route that linked Zacatecas and the mines of the far north with Mexico City.
Once Independence was won, the old Nueva Vizcaya was divided: on May 22, 1824 the states of Durango and Chihuahua were created, ratified by the federal Constitution of that year. Durango was thus born as one of the original states of the republic, with its capital, the city of Durango, officially renamed Victoria de Durango in honor of the first president, Guadalupe Victoria, born in its territory.
The episode that gave the state universal fame came with the Revolution. At the hacienda of La Coyotada, in the municipality of San Juan del Río, was born in 1878 José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, known the world over as Francisco 'Pancho' Villa, the legendary Centaur of the North, chief of the feared División del Norte and one of the most charismatic and controversial figures in Mexican history.
Durango gave the Revolution not only Villa, but also many leaders and soldiers of the armed struggle, and it was marked forever by that epic that made its plains and mountains the scene of decisive battles.
From the middle of the twentieth century, the arid landscapes, the clean light and the adobe villages of Durango turned the state into one of the great settings of world western cinema. It all began in 1954 with the filming of 'White Feather', and from then on dozens of Hollywood and Mexican productions arrived.
On sets such as those of Chupaderos and Villa del Oeste, today turned into tourist attractions, legendary films were shot with stars such as John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn. Pictures such as 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960) and 'The Wild Bunch' (1969), by Sam Peckinpah, helped make Durango famous as the 'land of cinema' of Latin America.
That intense film activity left a deep mark on local identity and on the local economy, and the state still actively promotes its natural settings to the audiovisual industry, laying claim to the title of 'Mexican Hollywood'.
In the far northeast of the state, inside the Bolsón de Mapimí —a desert basin shared with Chihuahua and Coahuila— lies the famous Zona del Silencio, a place wrapped in urban legends according to which radio waves would not travel there normally. The myth was fed by the fall in the area, in 1970, of an American test rocket, which drew technicians, the curious and all manner of tales about unexplained phenomena, meteorites and even extraterrestrial visits.
Beyond the fantasy, the Bolsón de Mapimí is a biosphere reserve of enormous ecological value, home to unique species such as the bolson tortoise, the largest land tortoise in North America, and to a fragile desert ecosystem. The area also preserves mining remains such as the impressive Ojuela suspension bridge.
The combination of science, nature and legend has made the Zona del Silencio one of Durango's great tourist magnets, a symbol of the enigmatic and outsized character of its deserts.
Durango is one of Mexico's main timber producers: its extensive pine and oak forests in the Sierra Madre Occidental sustain an important logging industry, while the lands of the Guadiana and of the semi-desert feed farming and a strong tradition of cattle and dairy.
Mining, the cradle of its history, is still important, with the working of gold, silver, iron and other minerals. The capital keeps a remarkable historic center of pink quarry stone, with its baroque cathedral and its palaces, recognized for its colonial beauty, while the spectacular highway towards Mazatlán, with the dizzying Baluarte bridge, links the sierra with the Pacific.
Even so, Durango also faces the challenges of the Mexican north —the dispersal of its population, the isolation of the sierra and the pressures of organized crime—, in a state that combines the grandeur of its landscapes with a dense history running from the Tepehuanes to Pancho Villa and from the iron of the Cerro del Mercado to the screens of western cinema.
Guanajuato owes its origin and its splendor to silver. Founded as a mining town (real de minas) in the 16th century, the working of the Veta Madre turned the city into one of the richest in New Spain and one of the world's largest silver producers. The La Valenciana mine alone came to produce a good part of the world's silver of its day.
That mining wealth drew merchants and financed the great works of the viceroyalty, giving the city sumptuous Baroque churches, palaces and one of the most emblematic universities in the country.
Guanajuato's rugged terrain, boxed in among hills and crossed by a riverbed, gave rise to a city like no other, made of narrow alleys, stairways, small squares and underground tunnels that today serve as roads.
That urban labyrinth, with corners such as the famous Callejón del Beso, and its ensemble of colonial architecture led to the historic city of Guanajuato and its adjacent mines being declared a World Heritage Site.
Guanajuato was the epicenter of the outbreak of Independence. In the town of Dolores, in the small hours of September 16, 1810, the priest Miguel Hidalgo gave the Grito that started the war. A few days later the insurgents took the city of Guanajuato after the heroic and bloody episode of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, a fortified granary where the royalists had barricaded themselves.
According to tradition, a miner nicknamed 'El Pípila' set fire to the door of the building with a stone slab strapped to his back, opening the way for the assault. San Miguel el Grande, today San Miguel de Allende, was the birthplace of Ignacio Allende, another of the leading figures of the uprising.
San Miguel de Allende, with its colonial architecture, its cobbled streets and its iconic parish church of San Miguel Arcángel and its pink neo-Gothic spire, has become one of the most sought-after destinations in the world, chosen again and again among the best cities to visit.
Declared a World Heritage Site, it is home to a large community of artists, writers and foreign residents, and a benchmark for art, food and cultural life in the country, as well as a key place in the history of Independence.
The city of Guanajuato is today one of Mexico's cultural capitals, host to the Festival Internacional Cervantino, one of the largest performing arts gatherings in Latin America, which every October fills streets and theaters with shows from all over the world.
Among its attractions, which run from the sublime to the outlandish, is the famous Museo de las Momias, with naturally mummified bodies. The student tradition of the 'callejoneadas', with tuna minstrel bands and music, livens up the nights of this bohemian university city.
Beyond its heritage, Guanajuato is today one of the engines of the Mexican economy. The industrial corridor of the Bajío, with cities such as León —the world capital of footwear and leather—, Irapuato, Celaya and Salamanca, is home to a powerful automotive, manufacturing and agri-food industry.
That combination of colonial history, symbolic weight in the national identity and modern economic drive makes Guanajuato one of the most complete and most visited states in the center of the country.
The territory of Guerrero, of steep mountain ranges and warm coasts, was home to many peoples and was in contact with the great Mesoamerican civilizations from remote times: in the Mezcala region a peculiar style of stone sculpture developed, with geometric, abstract lines, much admired for how modern it looks, and in caves such as Juxtlahuaca and Oxtotitlán there survive rock paintings of clear Olmec influence, among the oldest in Mesoamerica.
When the Spanish arrived, what is now Guerrero was a mosaic of peoples —Nahuas, Mixtecs, Tlapanecs, Amuzgos and the warlike Yopes of the coast, who were never fully subdued by the Mexica. That ethnic and linguistic diversity survives to this day and makes Guerrero one of the states with the greatest indigenous cultural wealth in the country.
Much of the region was taken in as a tributary province of the Mexica empire, which drew cotton, cacao, gold and other goods from it, although Aztec control over the steep mountains and the coasts was never complete.
During the viceroyalty the great economic engine of the region was silver mining, and its capital was Taxco. In the 18th century the French-born miner José de la Borda amassed there one of the largest fortunes in New Spain, with which he financed the building of the dazzling church of Santa Prisca, a jewel of American Churrigueresque Baroque that still presides over the town.
Borda is credited with the famous phrase 'Dios da a Borda, y Borda da a Dios' —God gives to Borda, and Borda gives to God—, a reflection of the fabulous wealth that silver poured over Taxco. The town, with its steep streets, its white houses with red-tiled roofs and its silverwork, became one of the most beautiful and most distinctive colonial towns in Mexico.
Even today Taxco keeps its calling for silver: it is one of the great centers of artisan silverwork in the country, and its workshops and its Feria de la Plata keep alive a centuries-old tradition rooted in the wealth of colonial mining.
The port of Acapulco, on one of the most beautiful bays of the Pacific, was for almost two and a half centuries the gateway to Asia in America. From 1565 until the early 19th century, the Manila Galleon —the Nao de China— docked there every year, crossing the ocean with silks, porcelain, ivory and spices from the Philippines and the East to trade them for Mexican silver.
That transpacific trade made Acapulco one of the most important ports of the Spanish empire and a crossroads of cultures, and its annual fair drew merchants from all over New Spain. To protect the town from attacks by pirates and privateers, the crown built the imposing Fuerte de San Diego, which still commands the bay.
The mark of that exchange lives on in the food, the language and the traditions of the coast, and the Nao de China is remembered as one of the great episodes of early globalization, with Acapulco as its port of call in America.
Guerrero was one of the great stages of the war of Independence. On September 13, 1813, José María Morelos installed the Congress of Anáhuac in Chilpancingo, the first independent congress of Mexico, before which he read the 'Sentimientos de la Nación', a founding document that proclaimed independence, the abolition of slavery, popular sovereignty and equality, doing away with the distinctions of caste.
After the death of Morelos, the insurgent resistance in the south was kept up for years by Vicente Guerrero, a leader of humble origin who held the fight alive in the mountains until he came to terms with Agustín de Iturbide in the Plan de Iguala of 1821, which completed Independence. Guerrero would go on to be president of Mexico and decreed the final abolition of slavery in 1829, before dying by firing squad, betrayed, in 1831.
In honor of that hero, and on the initiative of general Juan Álvarez, the state was created on October 27, 1849 with territories detached from México, Puebla and Michoacán, and was given the name of Guerrero. Its capital, Chilpancingo, proudly bears the title of birthplace of the country's first constituent congress.
In the 20th century Acapulco lived through its second golden age, this time as the world capital of glamour. From the 1940s to the 1970s its bay became the favorite destination of Hollywood stars, tycoons and celebrities; the cliff divers of La Quebrada, who throw themselves from cliffs more than thirty meters high, became world famous, and the port was the setting for film shoots, romances and legendary parties that made it an icon of the international jet set.
To the southeast, the Costa Chica —which stretches toward Oaxaca— is home to one of the largest concentrations of Afro-Mexican population in the country, descended from the people enslaved and brought over during the colonial period. Its communities have preserved unique traditions, such as the danza de los diablos and the son de artesa, and their struggle for recognition helped Mexico officially recognize the Afro-Mexican people in its Constitution in 2019.
This double face —the cosmopolitan shine of Acapulco and the deep Afro-indigenous roots of the coast— reflects the extraordinary social and cultural diversity of Guerrero.
The Guerrero of the 21st century combines exceptional natural beauty with some of the harshest social problems in Mexico. Alongside the tourist bustle of Acapulco, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo and Taxco, the state carries high rates of poverty and marginalization, above all in the indigenous highlands of La Montaña, and a violence tied to organized crime that has hit this state especially hard.
Two tragedies marked recent memory: the forced disappearance of the 43 students of the Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, which took place in Iguala in September 2014, shocked the world and is still not fully resolved; and Hurricane Otis, which in October 2023 intensified to category 5 in a matter of hours and flattened Acapulco, leaving dozens dead and destruction without precedent in the port's history.
In spite of everything, Guerrero shows remarkable resilience: the rebuilding of Acapulco, the strength of its indigenous and Afro-Mexican cultures, the silverwork of Taxco and its founding role in national history keep alive the greatness of a state that gave Mexico its best-loved name from the Independence.
In what is now the state of Hidalgo rose Tula (Tollan), the great capital of the Toltec civilization that dominated central Mexico after the fall of Teotihuacan, between the 10th and 12th centuries. Its famous Atlantes, colossal stone warriors more than four meters tall that once crowned a pyramid, are one of the icons of pre-Hispanic art.
The Toltecs were admired by the Mexica as masters of the arts, of wisdom and of civilized life, and their influence and their myth of Quetzalcóatl reached as far as distant Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán, with which Tula shares astonishing similarities.
The region was and still is Otomí land, one of the most important indigenous peoples of central Mexico, along with the Nahuas and, in the Huasteca, the Tenek. After the conquest, the area was the target of intense evangelization.
In Actopan, Ixmiquilpan and other towns, imposing Augustinian monastery complexes were raised in the 16th century, with murals that mix the European and the indigenous, part of the heritage of the first evangelizations of New Spain.
During the colonial period and the 19th century, the mining region of Pachuca and Real del Monte was one of the largest silver producers in the country. In the 19th century English companies arrived and brought with them miners from Cornwall, who left behind an unusual cultural mark.
The Cornish introduced football to Mexico —the first match and the first club in the country were born here— and a pasty, the 'paste', today an emblematic dish of Hidalgo. The industrial architecture, the English cemeteries and the silver-processing methods of Real del Monte bear witness to that encounter.
Pachuca and its surroundings made up one of the most important mining regions in America. Here, in the 16th century, the patio process for separating silver with mercury was perfected, an innovation that revolutionized mining worldwide.
The mining landscape of Pachuca and Real del Monte, with its processing haciendas and its industrial heritage, is part of the Comarca Minera Geopark recognized by Unesco, witness to centuries of silver extraction.
Hidalgo offers remarkable natural attractions, such as the Prismas Basálticos of Huasca de Ocampo, spectacular columns of volcanic rock that rise beside a waterfall, and the grottoes of Tolantongo, with their turquoise hot-spring pools hanging on the side of a canyon, one of the most striking destinations in the center of the country.
The lush Huasteca of Hidalgo, green and tropical, contrasts with the semi-arid Valle del Mezquital, showing the range of landscapes of a small but varied state.
Pachuca, the capital nicknamed 'la Bella Airosa' for its winds, keeps its emblematic Reloj Monumental and its deep mining and football tradition, with one of the oldest and most decorated clubs in the country.
Today Hidalgo combines that rich historical and cultural heritage with its closeness to Mexico City, which drives its industrial and logistics development, and with a singular cuisine —from pastes to escamoles and maguey worms— inherited from its unique mixing of cultures.
Western Mexico was inhabited by peoples such as the Caxcanes, Cocas and Tecuexes, who led the fierce Mixtón War (1540-1541), the largest indigenous rebellion of the 16th century in New Spain, crushed only with difficulty by the Spanish.
After several attempts and moves, Guadalajara was founded for good on February 14, 1542 and became the capital of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia, with an Audiencia of its own, the second most important entity in New Spain after the viceregal capital.
Guadalajara's strategic location made it the great commercial, religious, administrative and cultural center of the west, a role it keeps to this day as the 'Pearl of the West' and the country's second great metropolis.
Its historic center, with the twin-towered cathedral, the Hospicio Cabañas —a World Heritage Site for the murals of José Clemente Orozco— and its squares and theaters, bears witness to centuries of splendor. The city is the birthplace of key figures of Mexican culture.
Jalisco is the land of tequila, the spirit distilled from the blue agave that grows in the fields around the town of the same name. With a protected denomination of origin, tequila is today a product of worldwide fame, and the Agave Landscape of Tequila, with its blue fields and its old distilleries, was declared a World Heritage Site.
This drink, whose roots go back to the pre-Hispanic fermented agave beverages and which was industrialized in the colonial haciendas, is one of the great symbols of Mexican identity before the world.
Jalisco is also the source of the great symbols of 'the Mexican': the mariachi —music declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco, born in the ranch country of Cocula and Los Altos—, charrería (the national sport, also recognized by Unesco) and the jarabe tapatío.
The wide-brimmed hat, the string music and the charro suit that the world associates with Mexico have, to a large degree, roots in Jalisco, forged in the world of the cattle haciendas and the popular festivals of the west.
Guadalajara is a cultural powerhouse: birthplace of the muralist José Clemente Orozco, of the writer Juan José Arreola and of Juan Rulfo, host of the largest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world and a technology engine nicknamed the 'Mexican Silicon Valley'.
In the towns around it, Tlaquepaque and Tonalá are great centers of handicrafts and pottery, and Lake Chapala, the largest in Mexico, draws residents and a sizable community of foreign retirees with its mild climate.
On the coast, Puerto Vallarta has established itself as one of the main beach destinations of the Pacific, with a charming traditional center on the shore of Bahía de Banderas, popular after having served as the setting for Hollywood productions.
Jalisco was also one of the epicenters of the Cristero War (1926-1929), the Catholic uprising against the anticlerical laws of the post-revolutionary government, which left a deep mark on the devout region of Los Altos. Today the state combines tradition, faith, industry and unmatched cultural weight.
Mexico City stands on the spot where, according to legend, the Mexica saw the eagle devouring a serpent on a nopal cactus —the emblem of the national coat of arms— and around 1325 founded their capital, México-Tenochtitlan, on an islet in Lake Texcoco.
In less than two centuries they turned it into a dazzling city of canals, causeways, chinampas and temples, with perhaps more than two hundred thousand inhabitants —more than any European city of the time— and the center of a vast tributary empire. Its Templo Mayor, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tláloc, was the religious heart of the Mexica world.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spanish razed the indigenous city and on its rubble built the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, laying out the great square —the Zócalo—, the metropolitan cathedral over the Mexica sacred precinct and the palace of the viceroys.
For three centuries it was the most important city in the Americas, seat of power, of the first university on the continent (1551) and of a splendid baroque art. The progressive draining of the lakes, begun to control flooding, would transform the valley's lake landscape forever.
The city was the setting for the great events of Mexican history: the triumphal entry of the Army of the Three Guarantees in 1821, the United States invasion and the raising of its flag over the Zócalo in 1847, the defense of Chapultepec Castle by the Niños Héroes, the modernization of the Porfiriato and the entry of the revolutionary armies of Villa and Zapata in 1914.
As the capital, it concentrated the political and symbolic power of the nation, and in its streets, squares and palaces the fate of the country was decided again and again through two centuries of independent life.
In the 20th century, the city grew explosively until it became one of the largest metropolises on the planet, its metropolitan area passing twenty million inhabitants, a magnet for migrants from all over the country.
The devastating earthquake of September 19, 1985, of magnitude 8.0, which caused thousands of deaths and enormous damage —made worse by the soil of the old lake—, left a deep mark on its memory. The solidarity of civil society, in the face of the government's slowness, strengthened the social fabric and the democratic awakening of the capital.
Mexico City is today one of the great cultural centers of the world. Its Historic Center and the canals and chinampas of Xochimilco are a World Heritage Site; it holds world-famous museums such as the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the legacy of the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Coyoacán and the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
With an internationally recognized food scene, neighborhoods steeped in history such as Coyoacán and San Ángel, and nearby Teotihuacan at its doorstep, the capital brings together in every corner the pre-Hispanic, the colonial and the contemporary.
In 2016, the capital ceased to be the Federal District and became the federal entity of Mexico City, with its own constitution and full autonomy, on an equal footing with the other states of the federation.
Modern, chaotic and fascinating, cosmopolitan and deeply rooted in its past, Mexico City remains the political, economic and cultural heart of the country, a mega-city of contrasts that concentrates a good part of the history, the creativity and the challenges —from mobility to water and inequality— of 21st-century Mexico.
Michoacán was the heart of the powerful Purépecha or Tarascan kingdom, the only great Mesoamerican civilization that successfully resisted the conquests of the Mexica empire, which never defeated it on the battlefield. With its capital at Tzintzuntzan, beside Lake Pátzcuaro, the Purépecha developed a remarkable copper metallurgy and a rich culture.
Their language, their traditions and their crafts survive to this day in the communities of the Purépecha plateau, and their ancient 'yácatas' —pyramids of mixed ground plan— bear witness to a state that rivalled the Mexica in power.
After the conquest, marked by the violence of the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán, bishop Vasco de Quiroga —'Tata Vasco' to the indigenous people— organized hospital-towns inspired by Thomas More's Utopia and gave each community a specialty in a craft trade.
That legacy endures: even today, each town of the lake and the plateau is known for its own craft —copper in Santa Clara, guitars in Paracho, pottery in Capula, catrinas and furniture in others—, forming one of the richest craft heritages in Mexico.
The city of Valladolid, today Morelia, was founded in 1541 and became one of the most elegant colonial cities in the country, built in pink quarry stone, with a magnificent historic center declared a World Heritage Site.
Its majestic cathedral, its eighteenth-century aqueduct, its convents and palaces and its stately viceregal air make it one of the most beautiful capitals in Mexico, and also the seat of a deep cultural and university tradition.
Two key figures of Independence came out of Michoacán: José María Morelos, the brilliant military strategist and statesman who gave his name to the city of Morelia and to the state of Morelos, author of the 'Sentimientos de la Nación'; and Agustín de Iturbide, who consummated independence and became the first emperor.
Both were born in Valladolid, and the city keeps the memory of those founding fathers, as well as its part in the early conspiracies for independence, in a region that left a strong mark on the national history.
Michoacán is famous around the world for the Night of the Dead, whose most moving expression is lived on the island of Janitzio and in the towns around Lake Pátzcuaro, where families honor their dead among candles, copal incense and cempasúchil flowers, in night vigils beside the graves.
This deep Purépecha tradition, recognized by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is one of the most beautiful and authentic Day of the Dead celebrations in all of Mexico.
The state holds natural wonders: the monarch butterfly sanctuaries, which it shares with the State of Mexico; the Paricutín volcano, born out of nothing in a cornfield in 1943 before the eyes of the local people; and a geography of lakes, forests and coast in the Tierra Caliente.
Michoacán cooking —with its corundas, uchepos, carnitas and atole— is so rich that it is a central part of the traditional Mexican cuisine declared World Heritage. For all its beauty, the state also faces security challenges tied to organized crime.
The territory of Morelos, with its mild climate and fertile soils, was the seat of important pre-Hispanic centers. The most notable is Xochicalco, a fortress-city that flourished after the fall of Teotihuacan, between the seventh and tenth centuries, with its famous Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent and an astronomical observatory; its ruins are a World Heritage Site.
The region was inhabited by the Tlahuica and other Nahua peoples, who paid tribute to the Mexica empire and farmed the fertile valley, where cotton and the produce of the hot lowlands were abundant.
After the conquest, the privileged climate of Cuernavaca —the ancient Cuauhnáhuac— attracted Hernán Cortés himself, who received the vast Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca and set up his residence in the city, the Palacio de Cortés, one of the oldest civil buildings in continental America.
Cortés introduced the growing of sugar cane and established large plantations and mills, starting the sugar hacienda economy that would shape life in the region for centuries and lay the ground for future conflicts over land.
Morelos is the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the 'Caudillo del Sur' and one of the most emblematic figures of the Mexican Revolution. Faced with the stripping of communal lands by the powerful sugar haciendas, Zapata led the peasants under the Plan de Ayala (1911) and the motto 'Tierra y Libertad', demanding the return of the land to the villages.
His tenacious, uncompromising struggle, until his treacherous murder at the hacienda of Chinameca in 1919, turned Morelos into the bastion of revolutionary agrarianism and Zapata into a worldwide symbol of peasant justice and the dignity of the people.
The kind climate made Cuernavaca the 'city of eternal spring', a resting place since viceregal times and a summer refuge for emperors, presidents and artists. Maximilian had his retreat here, the Jardín Borda, and through the twentieth century the city drew residents from the capital in search of its mild weather.
That standing as a place of rest, with gardens, bathing resorts and hot springs, still defines the appeal of Cuernavaca and of much of the state, a short distance from Mexico City.
Tepoztlán, at the foot of a spectacular range of crags crowned by the pyramid of El Tepozteco, dedicated to the god of pulque, is a Pueblo Mágico wrapped in mysticism and tradition. Very popular for its markets, its 'tepoznieves', its energy and its bohemian atmosphere, it draws spiritual seekers and weekend visitors.
The myth of Quetzalcóatl, whose legend links his birth to this place, and the festivals that mix the pre-Hispanic and the Catholic make Tepoztlán one of the most singular and most visited towns in central Mexico.
Morelos combines its closeness to the capital with a rich archaeological, colonial and natural heritage in a small but intense territory. Its sixteenth-century monasteries on the slopes of Popocatépetl are a World Heritage Site, and its many hot-spring resorts have made it a destination for leisure.
A university state with farming and industry, it packs pyramids, haciendas, magical towns and nature into little space, summing up much of the history and culture of the heart of Mexico.
Nayarit keeps one of the most remarkable living indigenous cultures in Mexico: the Wixárika (Huichol) and the Cora (Náayeri), peoples of the Sierra Madre Occidental who held on to their independence well into the colonial period, resisting the conquest almost until the eighteenth century.
These peoples preserve an extremely rich worldview, their pilgrimages to the sacred desert of Wirikuta —in San Luis Potosí—, their ritual relationship with peyote and their dazzling beadwork and yarn art, with their 'ojos de dios' and thread paintings that tell their mythology.
The island of Mexcaltitán, a lakeside village surrounded by estuaries and reached by canoe, is one of the most singular spots in the state. Some historians consider it the mythical Aztlán, the place of origin from which the Mexica set out on their pilgrimage toward the Valley of Mexico.
With its circular layout, its streets that turn into canals in the rainy season —which has earned it the nickname of the 'Mexican Venice'— and its life tied to shrimp fishing, Mexcaltitán keeps a unique atmosphere, halfway between history and legend.
Through the colonial period and much of the nineteenth century, the territory of Nayarit was a dependency of Nueva Galicia and then of Jalisco, as the District of Tepic. Its capital, Tepic, grew as a farming and trading center in the valley at the foot of the Sanganguey volcano.
After a long process of claiming its autonomy, Nayarit reached the rank of free and sovereign state of the federation in 1917, with the new Constitution, taking its name from that of a legendary Cora chief who resisted the Spanish.
The coast of Nayarit has been transformed in recent decades into the Riviera Nayarit, one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations on the Mexican Pacific, stretching along Banderas Bay and northward.
Alongside luxury developments such as Punta Mita, towns that were once fishing villages have become landmarks of international tourism, which is drawn by their beaches, their relaxed atmosphere and their still little-altered nature.
Towns such as Sayulita and San Pancho (San Francisco) went from quiet villages to meccas of surfing, bohemian life and international tourism, with their colorful atmosphere, their surfboards, their street art and their mix of travelers from all over the world.
The Marietas Islands, with their famous 'hidden beach' inside a crater, and the rich marine life of the bay round out a highly prized offer of nature and beach, on a coastline that combines tourist development with natural beauty.
Beyond tourism, the economy of Nayarit has traditionally rested on tropical farming —tobacco, sugar cane, mango, coffee— and on fishing, with a fertile coastal plain watered by rivers that come down from the sierra.
With its combination of indigenous sierra, marshes, historic islands and fashionable beaches, Nayarit offers a mosaic of landscapes and cultures in a relatively small state, one that has managed to project itself to the world through its coastline without losing its rich inland heritage.
The arid northeast was the territory of nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples and one of the last frontiers colonized by the Spanish. Monterrey was founded for good in 1596 under the name of Ciudad Metropolitana de Nuestra Señora de Monterrey, at the foot of the imposing Cerro de la Silla, the symbol of the city.
The settlement, in the Nuevo Reino de León, was for centuries a modest cattle and farming center in a hard region, exposed to raids by the indigenous peoples of the north and far from the great centers of the viceroyalty.
In the peopling of the Nuevo Reino de León, families of Sephardic Jews (crypto-Jews) played a notable part, such as those linked to the founder Luis de Carvajal, who sought to get away from the reach of the Inquisition in the center of the viceroyalty.
That element, together with Tlaxcaltec settlers and colonists of varied origin, helped forge a particular regional identity on a harsh frontier, where effort and self-sufficiency became central values of northeastern culture.
From the end of the nineteenth century, taking advantage of the arrival of the railroad and its closeness to the United States, Monterrey became the industrial capital of Mexico. The founding of the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc and of the Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey around 1900 set off an unprecedented industrial take-off.
Out of those roots came the great business groups of Monterrey —cement, glass, steel, food, banking— which today are among the largest in Latin America, forging an identity of hard work, drive and northern pride.
Ringed by the Sierra Madre Oriental, Monterrey has spectacular natural surroundings at the city's gates. Cumbres de Monterrey National Park, the Cola de Caballo waterfall, the Cañón de la Huasteca with its vertical walls, and the García caves are settings for hiking, climbing and ecotourism very close to the city.
This combination of a great industrial city and imposing mountains is one of the hallmarks of Monterrey, whose skyline stands out against the peaks of the Sierra Madre.
With prestigious institutions such as the Tecnológico de Monterrey and the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, and a powerful diversified economy, Nuevo León is today one of the richest, most industrialized and most dynamic states in the country.
Monterrey and its metropolitan area are a great magnet for investment, talent and migrants, with high levels of development, though also with the challenges of rapid urbanization, pollution and inequality typical of a large industrial metropolis.
Regiomontano culture, with its characteristic accent and humor, its music and its famous carne asada —the social ritual par excellence of the north—, is an essential part of the state's identity. The city has also renewed its cultural offer with venues such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MARCO) and the Paseo Santa Lucía.
Modern, industrial and proud of its history, Nuevo León stands out as one of the most competitive regions in Mexico and as a key gateway to the markets of North America.
Oaxaca is the state with the greatest ethnic and linguistic diversity in Mexico, home to sixteen Indigenous peoples —among them Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Mazatecs, Mixes, Triquis, Chinantecs and Chatinos— as well as Afro-Mexican communities on the coast.
This extraordinary cultural plurality, with hundreds of linguistic variants, shows in the number of municipalities (570, the highest in Mexico, many of them governed by 'usos y costumbres'), in its textiles, its festivals and its complex community organization, making Oaxaca one of the hearts of the country's Indigenous identity.
On a leveled mountaintop overlooking the central valleys, the Zapotecs founded Monte Albán around 500 BC, one of the first great cities of Mesoamerica, with its monumental plaza, its polychrome tombs, its ball court and its writing, reaching its peak between AD 300 and 700.
Later, the Mixtecs stood out for their exquisite gold work —such as the treasures of Tomb 7— and their codices. Mitla, with its extremely fine stone mosaics in fretwork patterns, was another great ceremonial center. This Zapotec-Mixtec heritage is a World Heritage Site.
The city of Oaxaca, founded by the Spanish in 1532, is a jewel of New Spain's baroque, with its cathedral, the splendid church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán and its convent —today a museum— and a street layout of green quarry stone that gives it an unmistakable color.
Its beautiful historic center, together with the neighboring archaeological site of Monte Albán, was declared a World Heritage Site, and the city keeps a vibrant cultural atmosphere that has turned it into one of the great destinations in Mexico.
Oaxaca gave Mexico two of its most important presidents, with opposite fates: Benito Juárez, the 'Benemérito de las Américas', a Zapotec lawyer, hero of the Reforma and the first Indigenous president in the Americas; and Porfirio Díaz, the soldier who would govern the country for more than three decades in the Porfiriato.
Both of humble Indigenous roots, they embody two faces of nineteenth-century Mexican history, and the city and the state keep alive the memory of these Oaxacans who shaped the fate of the nation.
Oaxaca lives by a rich calendar of festivals, led by the famous Guelaguetza, which every July gathers in the capital delegations from every region of the state to share their music, dances, costumes and produce in a great celebration of cultural diversity.
Its markets, the rugs of Teotitlán, its alebrijes of carved and painted wood, and its Day of the Dead traditions round out a living heritage that makes Oaxaca one of the states with the richest cultural expression in the whole country.
Oaxaca is considered the culinary capital of Mexico: its seven moles, its tlayudas, its chapulines, its quesillos and its chocolate are emblems of traditional Mexican cuisine, declared World Heritage, and its artisanal mezcal, distilled from maguey, has won over the world.
Its valleys hold wonders such as the Tule tree —with its colossal trunk— and the petrified waterfalls of Hierve el Agua. On the Pacific coast, destinations such as Puerto Escondido —a surfing mecca—, Huatulco and the turtle beach of Mazunte combine nature with a relaxed atmosphere facing the ocean.
The Puebla-Tlaxcala valley was one of the most heavily populated regions of Mesoamerica. Cholula, continuously occupied for more than two millennia, holds the Great Pyramid of Tlachihualtépetl, the structure with the largest volume ever built on the planet, on top of which the Spanish raised the church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios.
A sacred city and a pilgrimage center dedicated to Quetzalcóatl, Cholula was the scene in 1519 of a massacre carried out by Cortés's troops as they advanced toward Tenochtitlan, a decisive and bloody episode of the conquest.
Puebla's territory is dominated by the great volcanoes of central Mexico: Popocatépetl, still active and smoking, and Iztaccíhuatl, the 'sleeping woman', whose snow-covered silhouettes preside over the landscape and the mythology of the region.
On their slopes stand the earliest sixteenth-century monasteries —a World Heritage Site—, evidence of the evangelization, and their constant presence has shaped the life, the legends and the identity of the peoples who live at their feet.
The city of Puebla was founded by the Spanish in 1531 as a city of ideal layout, planned for settlers from the peninsula and without a previous Indigenous base, a singular case in New Spain. Legend has it that angels drew its plan, hence its name Puebla de los Ángeles.
It became one of the richest and most beautiful cities of the viceroyalty, second in importance after the capital, and its magnificent historic center, with dozens of baroque churches, was declared a World Heritage Site.
Puebla is famous for its talavera pottery, of Hispano-Moorish origin and with its own denomination of origin, used to clad façades, domes and kitchens, giving the city its unmistakable tiled look.
From its convents came a refined baroque cuisine that gave Mexico two of its most emblematic dishes: mole poblano, a complex sauce of chiles, spices and chocolate, and chiles en nogada, a patriotic creation in the colors of the flag. The Rosary Chapel, covered in gold, is a high point of American baroque.
Puebla is known around the world for the Battle of May 5, 1862, when the Mexican army under General Ignacio Zaragoza defeated, against all odds, the powerful French army that was seeking to impose Maximilian's empire.
That improbable victory became a symbol of national dignity and resistance, and it is celebrated as a popular holiday, with great fervor even among the Mexican community in the United States, where the 'Cinco de Mayo' has become one of the best-known dates of Mexican culture.
The city of Puebla, industrial —with a historic car plant— and a university town, is still one of the most important in the country, the fourth largest metropolis in Mexico.
The state also offers pueblos mágicos such as Cholula, Atlixco —the 'city of flowers'—, Cuetzalan in the northern sierra, and Zacatlán of the apples, along with rich crafts and cooking, combining historical heritage, nature and economic drive in the heart of the central highlands.
Querétaro was frontier land between the settled cultures of central Mexico and the Chichimecs of the north. Otomí, Purépecha and Spaniards all took part in its founding in the sixteenth century, in 1531, in a legendary episode that tradition links to a battle and to the appearance of a cross and of the apostle Santiago in the sky.
The city, settled by evangelized Otomí people and by Spaniards, prospered as the center of the newly colonized frontier, a meeting point between settled Mexico and the arid north of the nomadic peoples.
Querétaro prospered thanks to its position on the Camino Real toward the mines of the north, and filled with convents, churches and palaces that make its historic center one of the best preserved in the country, declared a World Heritage Site.
Its majestic eighteenth-century aqueduct, with its dozens of quarry-stone arches, is the emblem of the city and one of the great works of Mexican colonial engineering, built to carry water to a growing population.
Querétaro played a leading role at the start of Independence. In 1810, at the literary gatherings held in the corregidor's house, the conspiracy for independence took shape. When the plan was discovered, the Corregidora, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, managed to warn the conspirators of Dolores and San Miguel, which brought forward the Grito de Dolores.
That episode turned Querétaro into the 'cradle of Independence', and the figure of the Corregidora, locked up by her husband to stop her from raising the alarm, remained one of the great female symbols of the patriotic struggle.
The city was the setting for two more decisive moments in national history. In 1867, after the siege of the city, Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg was captured and executed by firing squad on the Cerro de las Campanas, putting an end to the Second Empire and restoring the Republic.
Half a century later, in 1917, the Constituent Congress met in Querétaro's Teatro de la República and proclaimed the constitution still in force, one of the most advanced of its time. Few episodes carry so much founding weight in a single city.
In the north of the state, the Sierra Gorda holds five eighteenth-century Franciscan missions, a project driven by Fray Junípero Serra before he left for California, with façades of an exuberant 'mestizo' or Indigenous baroque full of color, declared a World Heritage Site.
These jewels sit inside a biosphere reserve of enormous biodiversity, running from semi-desert to cloud forest, one of the richest and best preserved ecosystems in central Mexico.
In recent years, Querétaro has become an emerging wine and cheese region, with wine routes around Tequisquiapan, Ezequiel Montes and Bernal —dominated by its enormous monolithic rock—, which draw a growing wine tourism.
At the same time, it is one of the states with the highest economic and industrial growth (with aerospace and automotive sectors) and the best quality of life in the country, combining its deep historical heritage with a modern drive that places it among the most prosperous states in Mexico.
The Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo was home to important Maya trading ports of the Postclassic period. Tulum —the only walled Maya city facing the sea, with its Castillo looking out from the cliff over turquoise water— and the shrines of the island of Cozumel, dedicated to the goddess Ixchel, were centers of pilgrimage and trade.
The region was part of an active exchange network of salt, jade, cacao, honey and other goods that traveled the canoe routes across the Maya Caribbean, connecting the peninsula with Central America. Inland, cities such as Cobá, with its causeways and its tall pyramid, dominated wide territories.
The eastern coast of the peninsula was among the first land sighted by the Spanish, but through the colonial period it remained a marginal region, covered in jungle and thinly populated, a refuge for pirates and for rebel Maya, far from the centers of power in Mérida.
Isolation and dense jungle kept much of the territory outside effective Spanish control, a factor that would prove decisive in the conflicts of the nineteenth century and that preserved vast areas of untouched nature.
In 1847 the Caste War broke out in the peninsula, one of the largest Indigenous rebellions in the history of the Americas, in which the Maya rose up against the criollo and mestizo population. Out of the conflict came the cult of the 'Talking Cross' and a rebel Maya territory, independent in practice, in what is now Quintana Roo, for decades.
With their capital at Chan Santa Cruz —today Felipe Carrillo Puerto—, the cruzob Maya held out against the Mexican government until the early twentieth century. The Territory of Quintana Roo was created in 1902, and the region only reached the rank of state in 1974, one of the youngest in the country.
At the beginning of the seventies, the Mexican government chose an empty strip of sand facing the Caribbean to create, in a planned way and from scratch, a great tourist resort: Cancún. The project, one of the most ambitious planned tourism developments in the world, completely transformed the region.
In a few decades, Cancún went from a deserted island to the leading tourist destination in Mexico and one of the most visited on the planet, an economic engine that pulled along the development of the whole coast and the demographics of the state.
The success of Cancún drove the development of the Riviera Maya, the tourist corridor that stretches south along the coast: Playa del Carmen, with its lively Quinta Avenida; Tulum, which combines Maya ruins, beach and a 'boho-chic' atmosphere; and the islands of Cozumel, Isla Mujeres and Holbox, paradises for diving and rest.
Ecotourism parks, cenotes, the Sian Ka'an Reserve —a World Heritage Site— and world-class infrastructure make this strip one of the largest tourist hubs in Latin America.
To the south, Bacalar and its lagoon of seven colors, crystal-clear water over white beds, and the great Mesoamerican Reef —the second largest reef system in the world after the Australian Great Barrier— round out a coastline of exceptional beauty.
Quintana Roo faces today the challenges of accelerated growth: the pressure on its ecosystems, the arrival of sargassum and the need for more sustainable development, in a state whose prosperity depends on preserving the very natural wonders that made it famous.
The Potosí highlands were the territory of the Guachichiles, one of the fiercest of the Chichimec peoples, who led the long and bloody Chichimeca War against the Spanish through much of the sixteenth century.
The discovery of silver at the Cerro de San Pedro led to the founding of the city in 1592, named San Luis in honor of king Louis IX of France, and 'Potosí' out of the hope that it would match the wealth of the famous Cerro de Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. Silver mining turned it into a prosperous colonial city of neighborhoods organized by guilds and of sumptuous churches.
San Luis Potosí played a notable part in national politics. During the French intervention, Benito Juárez established there, on several occasions, the roving capital of the Republic, and it was in the city that the death sentence of Emperor Maximilian was signed.
That status as provisional seat of republican power, in the geographic heart of the country, gave the city a special historical weight in the decisive years of the Reforma and of the defense of national sovereignty against the European invasion.
In 1910, from the city jail and later in exile, Francisco I. Madero proclaimed the Plan de San Luis, the founding document that denounced Porfirio Díaz's electoral fraud and called on the people to take up arms on November 20 of that year.
That call set off the Mexican Revolution, which places San Luis Potosí among the key sites of the revolutionary outbreak, bound forever to the name of Madero and to the beginning of the first great social revolution of the twentieth century.
The state takes in contrasting landscapes. In the semi-desert of the altiplano perches the spectacular mining town of Real de Catorce, an almost ghostly Pueblo Mágico reached through a long tunnel, a testament to the splendor and the decline of silver mining.
This region is part of Wirikuta, the sacred land of the Wixárika (Huichol) people, the destination of their age-old pilgrimages in search of peyote, and one of the most important spiritual territories of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.
In the east, the lush Huasteca Potosina unfolds a tropical world of turquoise waterfalls, rivers, canyons and jungle, with natural wonders such as the Tamul waterfall, the sótanos —enormous vertical sinkholes— and the bathing spots of Tamasopo and the source of the Huichihuayán river.
Home to the Tének (Huastec) people and to Nahuas, this region of astonishing beauty has become one of the country's great destinations for ecotourism and adventure, a complete contrast to the aridity of the Potosí highlands.
Deep in the jungle of Xilitla, in the Huasteca, the eccentric English aristocrat and patron Edward James created Las Pozas, an astonishing surrealist sculpture garden with dozens of concrete structures —staircases that lead nowhere, fantastical columns and arches— set among waterfalls and vegetation.
This one-of-a-kind site, a refuge of European surrealism transplanted into the Mexican jungle, is one of the most singular and surprising places in Mexico, a distillation of the contrasting and fascinating character of the whole state of San Luis Potosí.
Before the conquest, the lands of Sinaloa were peopled by groups such as the Tahue, the Totorame, the Cahíta and the Mayo, along with other farming and fishing peoples of the fertile river valleys that run down from the Sierra Madre toward the Sea of Cortés. The Aztatlán cultural tradition flourished in the region, with remarkable polychrome pottery and metalwork, in contact with Mesoamerica and with the cultures of the North American southwest.
Tradition holds that the Mexica migration passed through these lands before reaching the Valley of Mexico, and some place the mythical Aztlán, cradle of the Aztecs, in the northwest; near Culiacán stood the great Indigenous settlement of Huey Colhuacan. That association links Sinaloa to the legendary origins of the Mexica people.
During the colonial period, evangelization fell above all to the Jesuits, who founded a chain of missions along the rivers among the Cahíta peoples, transforming the Indigenous world profoundly before their expulsion in 1767.
The conquest of Sinaloa was the work of the cruel Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, who after laying waste to Nueva Galicia pushed northwest sowing terror among the Indigenous peoples. In 1531 his forces founded the Villa de San Miguel de Culiacán, placed under the patronage of the archangel Saint Michael, which became the base of operations for the exploration, evangelization and colonization of much of the northwest of New Spain.
Expeditions set out from Culiacán toward the unknown north, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca passed through there at the end of his incredible journey on foot across the continent. For centuries the town was the main Spanish outpost in a remote, isolated and often hostile region.
The territory was taken into the vast province of Nueva Vizcaya and later into the comandancia of the Provincias Internas, always keeping the character of a mining and cattle frontier at the northwestern edge of the empire.
Once Independence was won, Sinaloa and Sonora were joined into a single entity, the Estado de Occidente, created in 1824. The union proved unworkable because of the distances and the rivalries, and in 1830 the two regions separated: the state of Sinaloa was born, with Culiacán as its capital, taken in as one of the entities of the federation.
The Sinaloan nineteenth century was turbulent, marked by the struggles between liberals and conservatives, by foreign invasions and raids by adventurers, and by the growth of the port of Mazatlán, which became the main commercial hub of the northwest Pacific and the gateway for goods and for European and Asian immigrants.
During the Porfiriato and the early twentieth century, the arrival of the railway and the great irrigation works laid the foundations of what would become the state's definitive calling: large-scale irrigated agriculture in its fertile coastal valleys.
Sinaloa is today the most important farming state in Mexico, proudly nicknamed 'the granary of the nation'. Its enormous irrigated valleys —Culiacán, Guasave, El Fuerte— produce much of the country's corn, beans, chickpeas, vegetables and, above all, tomatoes, a large share of which is exported to the United States.
To that agricultural wealth is added a powerful fishing industry in the Sea of Cortés, with Mazatlán as one of the main shrimp and tuna ports in Mexico. The combination of farmland and sea has made Sinaloa one of the most dynamic economies in the northwest.
Cities such as Los Mochis, the hub of the modern Fuerte valley, and Guasave grew on the back of this agricultural prosperity, while Culiacán, the capital, established itself as the thriving commercial, financial and service center of the whole region.
Mazatlán, the 'Pearl of the Pacific', is the great tourist port of the state, with its long malecón, its beaches and a beautifully restored historic center of nineteenth-century houses. Its Carnival, held since the end of the nineteenth century, is considered one of the oldest and most crowded in Mexico and in the world, and has the peculiarity of revolving around banda sinaloense music.
Because Sinaloa is, above all, the cradle of banda: that ensemble of wind and percussion instruments, born at the end of the nineteenth century from the fusion of Mexican traditions with the influence of European military brass bands, which has become one of the most popular and most exported genres of Mexican music. From this land came figures such as the film and song idol Pedro Infante, a source of national pride, and a whole lineage of performers of regional Mexican music.
The king of sports rounds out the popular identity: baseball stirs passions, and teams such as the Tomateros de Culiacán and the Venados de Mazatlán are beloved institutions of the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico.
Contemporary Sinaloa is a state of sharp contrasts: set against its agricultural, fishing and tourist prosperity is a history marked by drug trafficking, since the Sinaloan sierra was one of the birthplaces of poppy and marijuana growing and of the rise of powerful criminal organizations, which has colored the state's image for decades and has brought waves of violence, especially visible in Culiacán.
That phenomenon has seeped even into popular culture, in forms such as the narcocorrido, while Sinaloan society lays claim to a far broader and brighter identity, made of work, music, sea and hospitality.
Between the valleys that feed Mexico, the beaches of Mazatlán, the force of banda music and the weight of its challenges, Sinaloa stands as one of the most vital, productive and complex entities of the Mexican northwest, proud of its tough history and its unmistakable culture.
Sonora is a land of Indigenous peoples with a strong identity. The Yaqui and the Mayo of the southern valleys, famous for their Deer Dance —one of the most beautiful in Mexico— and for their tenacious resistance through history; and the Seri (Comcáac) of the coastal desert, with their deep relationship with the sea and their unique traditions.
These peoples have sustained their culture, their language and their territory for centuries, in some cases through long wars against colonial and republican governments, and they remain an essential part of Sonoran identity.
Colonization arrived hand in hand with Jesuit missionaries, chief among them Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, who at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth founded numerous missions, introduced cattle raising and wheat, and explored the northwest, proving that Baja California was a peninsula and not an island.
Kino's mission legacy, with his churches and his work in the Pimería Alta —straddling Sonora and Arizona—, left a deep cultural and agricultural mark across the whole desert region.
The Sonoran Desert, one of the most biodiverse in the world, holds the El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, with its lava fields, its volcanic craters and its great dunes, an almost lunar landscape declared a World Heritage Site.
This extreme region, where saguaros flourish and a specialized fauna survives, shows the wildest and most spectacular side of a state dominated by vast arid stretches between the sierra and the sea.
Sonora carried decisive weight in the Revolution and in the building of post-revolutionary Mexico. From its lands came the so-called 'Sonoran dynasty': presidents Adolfo de la Huerta, Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, who governed the country in the 1920s and laid the foundations of the modern state.
It was Calles who founded in 1929 the party that, after successive refoundings, would dominate Mexican politics for seven decades. The region supplied the military and political strongmen who decided the constitutionalist victory and the course of the country.
Sonora is today one of the main mining states in Mexico, the leader in copper production —with the enormous Cananea mine, also the birthplace of a historic strike in 1906— and an important gold producer.
Its quality cattle made Sonoran beef famous, along with dishes such as carne asada, the coyota and 'bacanora', hallmarks of northern culture. Hermosillo, the capital, is a modern industrial and automotive center in the middle of the desert.
On the coast of the Sea of Cortés, Puerto Peñasco —known as 'Arizona's beach' for its closeness and its popularity among Americans— has become a fast-growing tourist destination, where the desert meets the sea.
Bahía de Kino, San Carlos and other coastal towns round out an offering of beach, fishing and nature. A border state of mines, cattle and desert, Sonora combines a strong economy with landscapes of great beauty and living Indigenous cultures.
The State of Mexico is home to one of the most impressive sites in the Americas: Teotihuacan, the 'City of the Gods'. Between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD it was one of the largest cities in the world, with up to two hundred thousand inhabitants, dominated by the colossal Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon along the Avenue of the Dead, and by the temple of the Feathered Serpent.
Its culture radiated across the whole of Mesoamerica, and centuries after its mysterious collapse the Mexica looked on its ruins with veneration and gave it its Nahuatl name. It is a World Heritage Site and one of the most visited archaeological sites on the planet.
The valley of Toluca was home to the Matlatzincas and other peoples, and came under Mexica rule shortly before the conquest. Sites such as Malinalco, with its singular temple carved into the living rock, and Teotenango, a fortified city, also flourished in the region.
During the colonial period, the region was an important farming and cattle-raising center that supplied the viceregal capital. The city of Toluca, today the state capital, is the highest in Mexico and famous for its arcades, its market and its sweets and sausages.
The present State of Mexico was formed after Independence and originally included Mexico City itself, as well as territories that today make up other states. In 1824 the capital was separated off as the Federal District, in the very heart of the state.
Over the twentieth century, the explosive growth of the capital drew many of the state's municipalities into the great urban sprawl, turning municipalities such as Ecatepec, Nezahualcóyotl and Naucalpan into enormous cities and the state into the most populous in the country.
Besides its archaeological heritage, the state offers natural retreats very close to the megalopolis. Valle de Bravo, a Pueblo Mágico on the shore of a reservoir ringed by forests, is a weekend destination for water sports, paragliding, food and rest, much prized by the people of the capital.
Other spots, such as the forests of the Nevado de Toluca —a volcano with lagoons in its crater— and villages full of charm, round out an offering of nature and tourism close to home that contrasts with the urbanization of the east of the state.
In the forests of the west of the state, shared with Michoacán, lies the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, where every winter millions of butterflies complete one of the most astonishing migrations in the animal kingdom, after traveling thousands of kilometers from Canada and the United States.
The spectacle of trees completely covered in orange butterflies, a phenomenon declared a World Heritage Site, is one of the great natural wonders of Mexico and a symbol of the ecological connection of the continent.
The State of Mexico is one of the country's leading industrial powers, with vast manufacturing corridors in the valley of Toluca and in the built-up area adjoining the capital, as well as a strong output of crops and flowers.
It is, at the same time, a state of enormous contrasts: it holds great, densely populated cities alongside rural villages, world-famous archaeological sites, forests and volcanoes, reflecting in its territory the complexity and the diversity of contemporary Mexico.
Tabasco, a land of rivers, jungles and swamps, was one of the cradles of the Olmec culture, considered the 'mother culture' of Mesoamerica. Around 1200 BC, at the great ceremonial center of La Venta, the Olmecs carved colossal basalt heads —portraits of their rulers weighing several tons— transported from distant quarries.
There they developed the first traces of writing, the calendar, the cult of the jaguar and the serpent, and a complex political and religious organization that every later civilization would inherit. Many of those monumental pieces are kept today at the Parque-Museo La Venta, in Villahermosa.
It was on the coasts of Tabasco that Hernán Cortés fought the battle of Centla in 1519, the first great battle of the conquest of Mexico, against the Chontal Maya of the region.
After his victory, Cortés was given a group of Indigenous women as a gift, among them la Malinche (Malintzin or Marina), who was fluent in Nahuatl and Maya and would become his interpreter, adviser and a key piece in the fall of the Mexica empire. That first contact on Tabascan soil thus carried enormous historical weight.
During the colonial period, Tabasco was a tropical province, humid and difficult, battered by floods, disease and pirate attacks, tied more to the cacao trade —which the ancient Mesoamericans even used as currency— than to the mining or the large-scale agriculture of other regions.
Tabascan cacao, grown since pre-Hispanic times, remained the great product of the region, the basis of a chocolate-making tradition that endures and that gives Tabasco a prominent place in the history of chocolate.
Tabasco is one of the states with the most abundant water in Mexico, crossed by great rivers such as the Grijalva and the Usumacinta and covered with wetlands, lagoons and swamps that define its geography and its way of life.
The Pantanos de Centla Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest wetlands in North America, holds an extraordinary biodiversity, with manatees, crocodiles and a rich birdlife, and shows the most characteristic natural face of this warm, river-laced region of the southeast.
In the twentieth century, the discovery of enormous oil and gas deposits completely transformed the Tabascan economy and turned the state into one of the country's energy pillars, with intense Pemex activity on its territory and in the waters of the Gulf.
The oil boom brought growth, but also heavy environmental impacts on the fragile ecosystems of the region. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico from 2018 to 2024, comes from this land, which gave Tabasco a renewed prominence in national politics.
Villahermosa, the capital on the banks of the Grijalva river, is the great urban center of the state, home to the Parque-Museo La Venta and to a life shaped by the tropical heat and the nearness of the water.
Tabasco keeps its tropical farming calling —it is one of the country's largest producers of cacao, bananas and sugarcane—, its rich cuisine built on pejelagarto and river products, and an identity tied to the Olmecs, to cacao and to the great rivers that give it its unmistakable look.
The territory of Tamaulipas was inhabited by various nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the northeast, hunter-gatherers adapted to the coastal plains, the sierra and the semi-desert, who left their mark in archaeological sites and rock paintings.
It was one of the most difficult regions to bring under colonial rule, and one of the last: an open frontier for centuries where stable settlement proved slow and costly, shaped by the climate, the aridity of large areas and the resistance of the Indigenous peoples.
Tamaulipas was one of the last regions colonized by Spain, in the eighteenth century, when José de Escandón organized the colony of Nuevo Santander. Between 1748 and 1755, Escandón founded dozens of villas along the Rio Grande (Bravo) and inland, ordering the settlement of this northern frontier of the viceroyalty.
With families of colonists, ranchers and a few missionaries, towns were established that gave rise to many of today's cities, in a model of peaceful, planned colonization that shaped the present-day geography of the state.
The war with the United States (1846-1848) fixed the country's northern border at the Rio Bravo, splitting in two regions that had previously been joined and leaving Tamaulipas as a border state.
Cities such as Matamoros, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo became nerve centers of trade and of the crossing between the two countries. This border condition, with its intense flows of people and goods, would deeply mark the economy, the culture and the history of the state.
The port of Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico, experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century a spectacular oil boom that made it one of the most important and cosmopolitan ports in Mexico, with the 'Faja de Oro' among the largest oil fields in the world at the time.
That era left Tampico a remarkable art deco architectural heritage and a vibrant cultural life, and consolidated the southern region of the state as an industrial and port hub tied to energy and maritime trade.
Tamaulipas combines the Sierra Madre Oriental with the broad coastal plain of the Gulf. In the sierra lies the El Cielo Biosphere Reserve, an extraordinary enclave where cloud forest, temperate forest and tropical jungle come together, with an exceptional biodiversity that makes it one of the natural treasures of the northeast.
The coast, with its lagoons, its marshes and beaches such as Barra del Tordo or Miramar in Tampico, offers fishing, birds and rest, rounding out a territory of great variety of landscapes.
The economy of Tamaulipas rests on the border maquiladora industry, oil and petrochemicals, agriculture, ranching and intense trade with the United States, of which it is one of the great overland gateways.
Like other border states, in recent decades it has faced serious security challenges tied to organized crime. Even so, it keeps a strong northern identity, its border culture, its seafood cuisine and its strategic role in Mexico's economic relationship with its northern neighbor.
Before the conquest, Tlaxcala was an Indigenous lordship or confederation made up of four head towns, which had successfully resisted subjugation by the Mexica empire, against which it waged the ritualized 'flower wars' to capture prisoners.
Surrounded and blockaded by Mexica domains, warlike Tlaxcala kept its independence until the arrival of the Spanish, a factor that would prove decisive for the course of Mexican history.
Tlaxcalan territory preserves important pre-Hispanic remains. Cacaxtla, with its vivid and well-preserved murals of warriors and battle scenes —strongly influenced by the Maya and the Gulf—, is one of the sites with the most remarkable pre-Hispanic mural painting in the central highlands.
Alongside Xochitécatl and other sites, these remains show that the region was a crossroads of cultures and a settled center from very ancient times, long before the rise of the Tlaxcalan lordship.
The historic confrontation with the Mexica proved decisive. When Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, after a first and hard clash with the Tlaxcalan warriors, they chose to ally with the Spanish against their common enemy.
The Tlaxcalans contributed thousands of warriors, food, information and refuge, and their alliance was decisive in the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Without Tlaxcalan support, the conquest would have been very different, which gives this small people a central role in the history of Mexico.
As a reward for their alliance, the Spanish crown granted Tlaxcala exceptional privileges: it was recognized as a loyal city, a degree of autonomy was respected, and its inhabitants enjoyed a special status within the colonial regime.
The Tlaxcalans later took part, as trusted colonists, in the conquest and settlement of the north of the country, founding neighborhoods and towns in regions as distant as Coahuila, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas or Nuevo León. This dual role —allies of the conquest and colonizers— marks their historical identity.
Tlaxcala preserves a remarkable heritage of pulque haciendas, tied to the cultivation of maguey and the production of pulque, the ancestral fermented drink that supplied Mexico City on a massive scale, above all in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
These great estates, with their tinacales and their stately buildings, bear witness to an economy that revolved around 'aguamiel' and pulque, and many of them survive today as historic estates and tourist venues.
The state holds a remarkable colonial heritage, such as the Franciscan convent complex of its capital —one of the first in the Americas, with its famous Mudéjar coffered ceiling— and the sanctuary of Ocotlán, a jewel of the baroque. In the Palacio de Gobierno, the murals of Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin tell the history of the Tlaxcalan people.
Its colorful carnivals, with the 'huehues' and their dances and masks, are among the most striking in the country. Small in size but great in history, Tlaxcala combines its founding weight with a rich cultural heritage and a singular identity.
The Gulf coast was one of the great cultural corridors of Mesoamerica. In the south of present-day Veracruz the Olmec culture flourished, the 'mother culture', in centers such as Tres Zapotes and San Lorenzo, where colossal stone heads were found.
In the center, the Totonacs built remarkable cities, and in the north, the Veracruz Huasteca preserves the legacy of the Huastecs, with their art and their pottery. This mosaic of cultures made the Gulf coastal region a seedbed of civilization from very ancient times.
The Totonacs built El Tajín, whose astonishing Pyramid of the Niches, with its 365 recesses evoking the calendar, is one of the masterpieces of pre-Hispanic architecture and a World Heritage Site.
From that tradition comes the ritual of the Voladores de Papantla, recognized by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage: four men descend spinning on ropes from the top of a very tall pole while a fifth plays the flute and the drum, in an ancestral ceremony of deep symbolic weight.
It was on the Veracruz coast that Hernán Cortés founded in 1519 the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the first town council of continental America, from where he began the conquest of Mexico after breaking with the authority of the governor of Cuba.
Here the conquistadors landed, the fate of Mesoamerica was sealed and the venture began that would lead to the fall of Tenochtitlan. Veracruz was thus tied forever to the very origin of mestizo Mexico.
Through the three colonial centuries, the port of Veracruz was the great door in and out of New Spain: through it arrived the goods, officials and ideas of Europe, and out went Mexican silver toward Spain.
Through Veracruz also came numerous enslaved Africans, whose legacy deeply enriched the culture, the music and the cuisine of the region. The port was a fortress —with the castle of San Juan de Ulúa—, a customs house and a recurring stage for foreign invasions, including the French and the American ones.
Veracruz is the land of a vibrant mestizo culture, a synthesis of the Indigenous, the Spanish and the African. The son jarocho —of which 'La Bamba' is the most famous song—, the danzón that echoes under the arcades of the port, the oldest carnival in Mexico and a cuisine that ranges from seafood to vanilla, native to Papantla, define its identity.
Its mountains produce some of the best coffees in the country, in towns such as Coatepec and Xico, and its cultural capital, Xalapa, is home to a prestigious university and to one of the best anthropology museums in Mexico.
The geography of Veracruz is enormously diverse: from the snow-capped volcano Pico de Orizaba —the highest mountain in Mexico, at more than 5,600 meters— to the jungles of Los Tuxtlas, the whitewater rivers and the long beaches of the Gulf.
This natural variety, together with its enormous historical weight and its cultural richness, makes Veracruz one of the most diverse and representative states in the country, cradle of the conquest, of coffee and of one of the richest popular cultures in Mexico.
The Yucatán Peninsula was one of the great stages of Maya civilization. Chichén Itzá, with its pyramid of Kukulcán where the equinox traces the descent of the feathered serpent down the stairway, is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World and a World Heritage Site.
Uxmal and the cities of the Puuc route stand out for their refined architecture of stone mosaics, and sites such as Mayapán and Ek Balam round out an exceptional heritage. These cities formed leagues and confederations and led the last great stage of Maya splendor before the arrival of the Spanish.
The peninsula is a limestone platform without surface rivers, pierced by thousands of cenotes —wells and caverns of crystalline fresh water— that the Maya considered entrances to the underworld and sacred places, and which were, moreover, their main source of water.
Offerings and sacrifices were made in the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, and today the cenotes, with their transparent waters and their formations, are one of the greatest natural attractions of the region and a symbol of the relationship of the Maya with water and the sacred.
The conquest of Yucatán, begun by the Montejo family, was long and difficult because of the tenacious resistance of the Maya lordships, and dragged on for decades of the sixteenth century. Mérida was founded in 1542 on the Maya city of T'hó (Ichcaanzihó), using its stones to raise the cathedral, one of the oldest on the American mainland.
Far from the centers of the viceroyalty and with an economy of its own, Yucatecan colonial society was deeply unequal, with a criollo elite resting on the labor of the Maya majority, a tension that would explode in the nineteenth century.
In 1847 the Caste War broke out, one of the largest Indigenous rebellions in the history of the Americas, when the Maya, headed by leaders such as Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi, rose up against the criollo and mestizo population that controlled the land and the power.
The conflict, fueled by the extremely harsh working conditions on the haciendas, came close to driving the whites out of the peninsula and gave rise to a rebel Maya territory in the east that held out for decades. It was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in nineteenth-century Mexico.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Yucatán lived through the henequen boom, the agave fiber known as 'green gold', much in demand for cordage all over the world. The 'divine caste' of hacienda owners became immensely rich and filled Mérida with lavish French-style mansions along the Paseo de Montejo.
It is said that Mérida came to have one of the greatest concentrations of millionaires in the world, with street lighting and streetcars before the country's capital. But that wealth rested on the near-servile labor of Maya peons on the henequen haciendas.
Today Yucatán is one of the safest and most prosperous states in the country, with a unique cuisine of strong Maya roots —cochinita pibil, sopa de lima, papadzules, salbutes— and colorful colonial cities such as Valladolid and Izamal, the 'yellow city' of convents and pyramids.
Its vibrant capital, Mérida, combines heritage, culture and quality of life, and the state, with its living Maya legacy, its cenotes, its ruins and its restored haciendas, has established itself as one of the great cultural destinations of Mexico and a model for making the most of its enormous heritage.
Before the Spaniards arrived, the Zacatecan plateau was frontier land between the cultures of central Mexico and the Chichimec peoples of the north. The region holds La Quemada (Chicomóztoc), an imposing archaeological site of terraces, pyramids and columned halls whose identity and purpose are still debated.
The territory was dominated by Chichimec peoples such as the Zacatecos and Guachichiles, hunter-gatherers who would put up fierce resistance to the Spanish advance during the long Chichimec War.
Zacatecas was born of silver. In 1546, the discovery of extraordinarily rich veins on the slopes of the Cerro de la Bufa gave rise to one of the most productive mines in the world and to a city that, in the middle of Chichimec territory, became the second most important in New Spain after the capital.
Zacatecan silver financed empires, drove the global economy and drew miners, merchants and friars. From here the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro set off northward, today a World Heritage Site, seeding the route with haciendas, presidios and new settlements.
Mining wealth gave Zacatecas a magnificent architectural heritage. Its historic center, built in pink quarry stone and hemmed in between hills, with a cathedral considered one of the masterpieces of Mexican Baroque for its lavishly carved façade, was declared a World Heritage Site.
Churches, palaces, alleyways and squares bear witness to the viceregal splendor of this high-altitude city, the loftiest of the country's great colonial capitals, crowned by the Cerro de la Bufa, its emblem.
As a great mining center, Zacatecas played a significant role in the conflicts of the nineteenth century. The city and the state, tied to silver production, lived through the swings of Independence, the struggles between federalists and centralists —Zacatecas was a federalist stronghold, punished by Santa Anna in 1835— and the Reform.
Mining remained the axis of its economy, and the state's great haciendas and mining towns shaped a landscape and a society marked by work in the depths of the earth.
Zacatecas was the setting for one of the decisive battles of the Mexican Revolution: the Toma de Zacatecas, on June 23, 1914, when Pancho Villa's División del Norte stormed the city fortified atop the Cerro de la Bufa and wiped out the army of the usurper Victoriano Huerta.
That bloody and spectacular victory, one of the largest battles of the Revolution, brought down Huerta a few days later. It is remembered as one of the most glorious pages of villismo, and the Cerro de la Bufa today houses a commemorative museum and monuments to the revolutionary leaders.
Beyond its capital, Zacatecas holds real gems such as Jerez, birthplace of the poet Ramón López Velarde, and the old mining towns of Sombrerete, Pinos and Nochistlán, several of them Pueblos Mágicos.
The city is today an important cultural center, with festivals, museums —such as the art museums of the Coronel brothers— and an active university life. With its rich mining heritage, its pink quarry-stone Baroque and its revolutionary memory, Zacatecas sums up the history of silver and of the Mexican nation like few other states.