Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, with around 130 million people. It sits between the United States and Central America, covers about 1.96 million square kilometres, and contains deserts, rainforest, snow-capped volcanoes and 9,000 kilometres of coastline. It is also one of only seventeen countries in the world classed as megadiverse — meaning a huge share of the planet's species live there.
It Is Not a Small Country
Mexico is the thirteenth-largest country in the world by area, bigger than any country in Europe except Russia. It is about three times the size of Spain.
Its full official name is the United Mexican States, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, and it has 31 states plus Mexico City. That name was deliberately modelled on its northern neighbour when Mexico became a federal republic in 1824.
The border with the United States runs 3,145 kilometres and is one of the most frequently crossed in the world, with hundreds of millions of legal crossings a year.
Mexico City Is Sinking
Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world, with over 21 million people in the metropolitan area, and it is built on the bed of a drained lake.
The Aztecs founded their capital, Tenochtitlan, on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. The Spanish drained the lake after conquering it in 1521 and built their city on the soft mud.
That mud is still being squeezed as water is pumped out of the ground below. Parts of the city have sunk more than ten metres in the last century and some districts are still dropping by up to 40 centimetres a year. The Palacio de Bellas Artes has sunk so far that its ground floor is now below street level.
Volcanoes
Mexico sits on the Ring of Fire, and it has around 3,000 volcanoes, of which a few dozen are considered active.
Popocatépetl, 70 kilometres from Mexico City, is 5,426 metres tall and erupts regularly. Locals call it Don Goyo. Its neighbour Iztaccíhuatl is dormant, and the pair are the subject of an Aztec legend about a warrior and a princess.
Parícutin is the strangest one. In February 1943 a farmer named Dionisio Pulido was working in his cornfield in Michoacán when a crack opened in the ground and started smoking. Within 24 hours there was a cone 50 metres high; within a year, over 300 metres. It buried two villages and stopped erupting in 1952. It is one of the very few volcanoes whose entire life humans have watched from the first minute.
Chocolate, Corn and Chillies
Chocolate is Mexican. Cacao was cultivated in Mesoamerica for thousands of years, and the Aztecs drank it as a bitter, spiced, unsweetened beverage called xocolatl. Cacao beans were used as money — you could buy a turkey for around 100 of them.
Maize was domesticated in southern Mexico around 9,000 years ago from a scrappy wild grass called teosinte, which has tiny ears with a handful of hard kernels. Everything from popcorn to cornflakes descends from that one act of plant breeding.
Tomatoes, avocados, vanilla, turkeys, chillies and beans all come from Mexico too. Before 1492 there was no Italian tomato sauce, no Indian or Thai chilli heat, no Swiss chocolate and no chips anywhere — the potato is from Peru, but the pattern is the same.
Make a Papel Picado Banner
Papel picado is Mexican cut tissue paper, strung across streets and over altars for festivals. Craftspeople cut up to fifty sheets at once with chisels, but you can do it with scissors.
Take a rectangle of tissue paper, fold the top over to make a hem for the string, then fold the rest concertina-style. Cut shapes out of the folded edges — triangles, half-circles, notches — the way you would make a paper snowflake.
Unfold it and you have a lace pattern. Do several in different colours, glue the hems over a length of string, and hang it up. Traditional designs include skeletons for Day of the Dead, doves for weddings and flowers for spring.
Day of the Dead
Día de Muertos on 1 and 2 November is Mexico's best-known observance, and it is not a sad occasion. The belief is that the dead return to visit for those days, and the living make them welcome.
Families build an ofrenda, an altar with photographs, candles, marigold flowers whose scent is said to guide the spirits, and the food and drink the person liked in life. They visit cemeteries, clean and decorate the graves, and often stay all night with music and food.
The sugar skulls and painted faces are part of a longer tradition, and the elegant skeleton figure called La Catrina was drawn by the cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada around 1910 as a joke about Mexicans who imitated European fashions. UNESCO listed the indigenous festivity in 2008.
Ancient Cities
Mexico had large, complex civilisations for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The Olmec came first, from around 1500 BCE, and carved colossal stone heads up to three metres tall from basalt hauled dozens of kilometres.
Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, had perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 people around 500 CE, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time. Its Pyramid of the Sun is 65 metres tall. Nobody knows what its builders called it or what language they spoke — the name is Aztec and means the place where the gods were created, given by people who found it already abandoned and ruined.
The Maya built cities across southern Mexico and Central America, developed a full writing system, tracked the movement of Venus with great accuracy, and worked out the concept of zero independently of India. Chichén Itzá's main pyramid is built so that at the spring and autumn equinoxes the afternoon sun casts a shadow down the staircase in the shape of a snake.
Cenotes and the Asteroid
The Yucatan Peninsula in south-eastern Mexico has almost no rivers. Rain sinks straight through the porous limestone, and where cave roofs have collapsed there are thousands of natural water-filled sinkholes called cenotes.
The Maya depended on them for drinking water and treated them as sacred entrances to the underworld. Divers have found offerings and human remains at the bottom of several.
The strangest part is why they are where they are. Many of them form a huge arc across the northern Yucatan, and that arc traces the rim of the Chicxulub crater — the impact site of the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The rock along the crater edge fractured differently, and 66 million years later the caves and cenotes formed along the crack.
Animals Only Found Here
The axolotl is a salamander that never grows up. Most amphibians change form as they mature; the axolotl keeps its feathery gills and stays aquatic for its whole life. It can regrow legs, parts of its heart and even bits of its brain, which is why laboratories all over the world study it.
Wild axolotls live in the canals of Xochimilco in Mexico City and almost nowhere else, and there may be fewer than a hundred left in the wild. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands in tanks and labs.
Mexico also has the vaquita, the world's smallest and most endangered porpoise, with roughly ten individuals left in the Gulf of California. On the brighter side, its forests host the monarch butterflies that fly up to 4,800 kilometres from Canada each autumn, gathering in such numbers that fir branches bend under them.
Music and Colour
Mariachi is the sound most associated with Mexico: a band of violins, trumpets, a guitar, a small high-pitched vihuela and a big bass guitarron, all played standing up in matching charro suits with silver buttons. UNESCO added it to its heritage list in 2011.
Mexico has many other regional styles that are less exported — son jarocho from Veracruz, norteno and banda from the north, marimba music from Chiapas played on a huge wooden xylophone by several people at once.
Colour is used deliberately everywhere: in the pink of Mexico City's official rosa mexicano, in painted village houses, in the blue of Frida Kahlo's home, and in the murals that Diego Rivera and others painted on public buildings after the 1910 revolution to teach history to a population that largely could not read.
Language and Names
Spanish is the main language, but Mexico's constitution recognises 68 indigenous languages, with around 350 varieties. Nahuatl, the Aztec language, still has over 1.7 million speakers.
Nahuatl gave English a surprising number of words: chocolate, tomato, avocado, chilli, coyote, ocelot, shack and possibly guacamole, which comes from ahuacamolli, avocado sauce.
The name Mexico itself comes from Nahuatl, from Mexica, the name the Aztecs used for themselves. The country's flag shows an eagle on a cactus eating a snake — the sign the Mexica were told to look for when choosing where to build their city, and they found it on an island in Lake Texcoco. To keep exploring, read about where Spanish is spoken and see the full list of countries in North America.