🇲🇽 Mexico · Central Mexico
Valle de Bravo is one of the most elegant and best-loved Pueblos Mágicos in central Mexico: a town of white houses with red tile roofs, cobbled streets and a colonial church, looking out over a large artificial lake ringed by mountains and pine forest. Just over two hours from Mexico City, it has become the capital's favorite weekend escape, a mix of pretty town, nature, sport and sophisticated atmosphere.
The lake (a reservoir) is the soul of the place: people sail, kayak, paddleboard and take boat trips on it, while the mountains around it are one of the world's meccas for paragliding and free flight, thanks to their excellent wind conditions. Add waterfalls, lookouts, forest and, in winter, the closeness of the monarch butterfly sanctuaries, one of the most extraordinary natural spectacles on the planet.
This guide runs through the essentials of Valle de Bravo: the town and its lake, water sports and paragliding, the Velo de Novia waterfall, the nearby town of Avándaro, the monarch sanctuaries and the local food. It's a destination for combining rest, nature and adventure, ideal for a weekend escape or longer, with a charm that works in any season.
Valle de Bravo, an old pre-Hispanic settlement in the Matlatzinca and Mazahua region, was evangelized by the Franciscans in the 16th century (hence its church and its old name, San Francisco del Valle de Temascaltepec). In the 20th century, the building of the Miguel Alemán dam for hydroelectric power created the great lake that turned the town into a tourist and holiday destination. It's a Pueblo Mágico and one of Mexico City's favorite escapes. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province that surrounds the capital: land of Teotihuacan, the 'City of the Gods', of the Matlatzinca valley of Toluca, of the lakeside retreat of Valle de Bravo and of the monarch butterfly sanctuaries.
Read the history of State of Mexico →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
If you stand today on the waterfront of Valle de Bravo and look at the lake, you're looking at a landscape that didn't exist a century ago. Under those waters where sailboats now cross there was once dry land, farmed slopes and roads that sank forever when people decided to dam the river. The postcard that Mexico City fell in love with —the town of white houses and red roofs looking out over a mirror of water— is in fact the result of one of the biggest engineering works of 20th-century Mexico. Before all that, though, there was mountain, pine forest and peoples who had been here more than a thousand years.
The Valle de Bravo region, in the west of today's State of Mexico, was inhabited in pre-Hispanic times by peoples such as the Matlatzinca and the Mazahua, who lived off a landscape of mountains, forests and temperate valleys. The area, sitting in the transition between the highlands and the lowlands to the south, was part of a complex cultural mosaic, in contact with Mexica influence and, to the west, with the Purépecha world of Michoacán.
After the Spanish conquest, the evangelization of the region fell to the Franciscan friars, who in the 16th century founded the settlement around a monastery and a church dedicated to San Francisco de Asís. The place was long known as San Francisco del Valle de Temascaltepec, after the Temascaltepec mining jurisdiction it was tied to.
In the colonial period the town developed as a mountain settlement, with an economy based on farming, forestry and the region's mining. Its mild climate, its forests and its natural setting defined the character of the place from the start, perched on a slope with views over the valley.
In the 19th century, with Independence complete and the country being organized, the town swapped its colonial name for Valle de Bravo. The 'de Bravo' honors Nicolás Bravo, a prominent soldier and politician of the Independence era and the early years of the Mexican Republic, who held the presidency on several occasions.
Through the 19th century and into the early 20th, Valle de Bravo remained a relatively remote mountain town, living off farming, livestock and forestry, its life organized around the square and the church of San Francisco. Its natural beauty and its traditional architecture of white houses with red roofs gradually became its calling cards.
The town thus kept its quiet, rural character for a long time, with no idea of the radical transformation that a great engineering work would bring in the middle of the 20th century, changing its landscape and its fate forever.
The event that transformed Valle de Bravo completely was the building, in the mid-20th century, of the Miguel Alemán dam, a major hydroelectric work that formed part of a system meant to generate power and regulate the region's water to supply the center of the country. The dam held back the water in the valley, creating the vast artificial lake that is the soul of the place today.
The arrival of the lake radically changed the town's landscape and its calling. What had been a mountain settlement became a water destination, a mirror of water ringed by mountains that soon drew sailing and water sports enthusiasts, along with Mexico City families looking for somewhere to rest within reasonable reach of the capital.
From then on, Valle de Bravo began its transformation into a place of weekend villas, yacht clubs and tourism, combining the charm of its traditional town with the new activities around the lake. The discovery of its excellent conditions for free flight also made it, over time, an international reference point for paragliding.
In recent decades, Valle de Bravo has established itself as one of the most popular and sophisticated escapes in central Mexico. The combination of a pretty town of white houses and red roofs, a lake for water sports, mountains and forests for hiking, paragliding and cycling, and the closeness of the monarch butterfly sanctuaries turned it into a magnet for the people of Mexico City and for visitors from elsewhere.
The town developed a striking line-up of boutique hotels, chef-driven restaurants, galleries and design stores, taking on an elegant, bohemian air that coexists with its traditional character and its local market. Its inclusion in the Pueblos Mágicos program officially recognized its tourist, cultural and natural value.
Today Valle de Bravo embodies a particular mix: the old Franciscan mountain town transformed by the lake into a destination of nature, sport and rest. Its beauty, its climate and its atmosphere keep it among the country's favorite escapes at any time of year, especially in winter, when the spectacle of the monarch butterflies is added to the list.
There's a chapter in the history of Valle de Bravo that goes beyond tourism and nature, and that wrote it into the cultural memory of a whole country: the Festival de Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro, held on 11 and 12 September 1971 in the Avándaro valley, next to the town. Originally conceived as the musical backdrop to a car race, the event overran every forecast: it is reckoned to have drawn between 100,000 and 300,000 young people, an enormous crowd for the Mexico of the day, turning the small valley into a sea of people over two days of rain, mud and music.
Mexican rock bands singing in English and in Spanish took the stage —Three Souls in My Mind (later El Tri, of Alex Lora), Los Dug Dug's, Peace and Love, El Epílogo, among others—, and the press christened the festival the 'Mexican Woodstock'. It was an explosion of counterculture, freedom and youth barely three years after the Tlatelolco student massacre of 1968, in a country ruled with a heavy hand.
The reaction from those in power was immediate and fierce: the government and the conservative media condemned the festival as a symbol of moral decay, and an era of repression followed, known as the 'avandarazo', which for years pushed Mexican rock into the underground of the 'hoyos fonqui'. That's why, walking today through quiet, exclusive Avándaro, it's hard to imagine that this same place was, for one weekend, the epicenter of the greatest cultural shake-up of 20th-century Mexican youth.