Mexico

Mesoamerica was one of the world's cradles of civilisation. The Olmec carved colossal heads on the Gulf coast; Teotihuacan, near modern Mexico City, grew into one of the largest cities on Earth; the Maya built city-states across the southeast; and, by the fifteenth century, the Mexica (Aztecs) ruled a tribute empire from Tenochtitlán, an island capital in a highland lake.

Hernán Cortés landed in 1519, allied with the Aztecs' enemies, and — with European disease doing much of the work — destroyed Tenochtitlán by 1521. Three centuries of Spanish rule as the Viceroyalty of New Spain followed, built on silver, forced labour, a rigid caste hierarchy, and the Catholic Church, with the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe becoming a unifying national symbol. Independence, launched by the priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, was secured in 1821.

The young republic lost half its territory to the United States in the war of 1846–48, endured French invasion and a brief Habsburg emperor, and was then held for decades by the strongman Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution that began in 1910 — Madero, Villa, Zapata, Carranza — cost well over a million lives and produced the 1917 constitution and, from 1929, seventy years of one-party rule by the PRI. Power finally alternated in 2000. A militarised campaign against drug cartels launched in 2006 has been followed by years of high violence. Claudia Sheinbaum, elected in 2024, is the country's first woman president.

Modern Mexican identity is built on mestizaje, the blending of Indigenous and Spanish worlds, and it shows in everything from language to religion. Catholicism is overwhelmingly the majority faith, threaded through with Indigenous practice — nowhere more visibly than at Day of the Dead, when families build altars and visit cemeteries to welcome back the dead with marigolds, food, and candles.

Family is the centre of life, extended by ties of compadrazgo (godparenthood), and milestones such as the quinceañera fifteenth-birthday celebration are major events. Regional identity is strong: a Oaxacan, a norteño, and a chilango from the capital will each claim their own food, music, and character.

Mexico's cultural exports are large. The muralists Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros and the painter Frida Kahlo shaped twentieth-century art; mariachi, ranchera, son jarocho, banda, and, lately, regional Mexican corridos reach global audiences; and lucha libre wrestling, with its masked técnicos and rudos, is part sport, part theatre. Football is the mass passion.

Mexico has around 130 million people, roughly a fifth of them in Greater Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth. The industrial north, tied closely to the US economy through manufacturing and the maquiladora export plants, is the wealthiest region; the centre mixes services, industry, and farming; and the south — Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero — is the poorest and most Indigenous.

A large share of work is informal, from street vending to day labour. Remittances sent home by the roughly 38 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States are one of the country's biggest sources of foreign income, and many towns in the centre and west depend on them. Mexico is also a country of transit, with large numbers of migrants from Central America, Haiti, and Venezuela moving through it toward the US border.

Daily rhythms vary with region and class, but a late, substantial comida in the early afternoon, markets for fresh food, and a strong culture of neighbourhood and extended family are common threads. Fiestas for local patron saints punctuate the year in almost every town.

Traditional Mexican cuisine is on UNESCO's heritage list, and it begins with corn: dried maize treated with lime (nixtamal), then ground for tortillas, tamales, pozole, and sopes. Around it are chillies in dozens of varieties, beans, squash, tomatoes, and native chocolate and vanilla. The taco appears in endless forms — al pastor, carnitas, barbacoa, birria, fish tacos on the coasts.

Regional kitchens are distinct. Oaxaca and Puebla are known for their complex moles, sauces of chillies, spices, nuts, and chocolate; the Yucatán for cochinita pibil, pork marinated in achiote and sour orange and pit-roasted; the north for grilled beef and flour tortillas; the coasts for ceviche and aguachile. Street stalls and markets serve tlacoyos, tlayudas, elotes, chilaquiles, and quesadillas through the day.

To drink there are the agave spirits — tequila from Jalisco and mezcal, smokier and increasingly sought after, from Oaxaca and beyond — along with pulque, fresh fruit aguas frescas, atole, and a fast-growing craft-beer scene.

Mexico City rewards several days: the Zócalo and the excavated Aztec Templo Mayor, the National Museum of Anthropology, Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul, the canals of Xochimilco, and the pyramids of Teotihuacan an hour away. The colonial cities of the Bajío — Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro, Zacatecas — and Puebla with the great pyramid of Cholula are within easy reach.

The southeast holds the Maya country: Chichén Itzá and Uxmal in Yucatán, Palenque in the Chiapas jungle, the cliff-top ruins of Tulum, the cenote sinkholes, and the reefs off Cozumel and the Riviera Maya. Oaxaca combines a beautiful colonial capital with the Zapotec city of Monte Albán, the mineral terraces of Hierve el Agua, and a string of Pacific surf and beach towns.

Elsewhere, the Copper Canyon in the northwest is crossed by the El Chepe railway; Baja California Sur offers grey-whale lagoons, whale sharks off La Paz, and the resorts of Los Cabos; and the fir forests of Michoacán fill each winter with millions of migrating monarch butterflies.