Mexico Travel Information and Travel Guide

Mexico

Our Top Picks For Mexico

1 Barranca Del Cobre (Copper Canyon)

Ride the train, a horse, a bike - or just use your feet - to explore the awesome canyon country
2 Palenque

Ancient Maya temples rise majestically from a thick steamy jungle
3 Oaxaca

Fascinatingly lovely colonial city with great crafts, great ruins and great food
4 Mexico City

Highland megalopolis, ancient Aztec capital, kaleidoscopic canvas of riveting museums, culinary adventures and masked wrestlers
5 Teotihuacán

Explore a pair of mysterious and majestic pyramids, remnants of a mighty civilisation

6 Matacanes

Take the plunge into world-class canyoneering, with 27 cliff jumps
7 Morelia

One of Mexico's least known but most beautiful colonial cities, with rooftop bars and clubs nestled in Spanish relics
8 Mérida

Stroll the colonial-era streets of the Yucatán Peninsula's cultural capital and buy a local hammock for your travels
9 Playa del Carmen

The Riviera Maya's toniest stop offers amazing daytrips to crystalline cenotes, spectacular diving and an 800-year-old ruin or two
10 Guanajuato

A vibrant and picturesque city with a lively student scene, great cultural activities and a fascinating past
11 Pico de Orizaba

This dormant volcano, Mexico's highest peak, will test your endurance and reveal breathtaking vistas
12 Reserva Mariposa Monarca

The winter retreat for millions of highly colorful migrating butterflies of awesome stamina
13 Puerto Escondido

Super-relaxed coastal town for all tastes: surf, beaches, fishing, wildlife, nightlife
14 Mazatlán

A gorgeous colonial district only a short walk from a 20km-long crescent of sandy beach
15 Espíritu Santo

Kayak with whale sharks around this island of sea lions, this island of sea lions,

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Fast Facts about Mexico

GDP per person
US$7800
Area
1.9 million sq km
Remittances to Mexico by Mexicans living in the US
US$24 billion (2006)
Population
107 million
Number of languages spoken
50
Adult literacy
91%
US share of Mexican exports
85%
Annual population growth
1.15%

Our favourite Mexico Blogs (beta)

Soy Esteban!

Blog: VEGAS HAPPENS HERE - 6 July 2009

That headline, my friends, is about as much Spanish as I know.

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What I learnt in North America

Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 4 July 2009

So. After nearly three months the first leg of my round the world trip is over, and I’m nearly a quarter of the way through. So what have I learnt so far I’ve learnt I don’t need to do stuff every day. Sure, there’s always something to see, something to do, but trying to cram too [...]

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Manzanillo Rainy Season

Blog: Manzanillo Mexico Travel Blog - 4 July 2009

As you may have noticed, its raining, a lot. Isn’t it beautiful how the rain just makes the greenery come alive and turns the air so clear? A few days of downpour and the vegetation ... Related posts:Flu Season… even in Mexico So the weather here is changing.

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Introducing Mexico

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Travel Alert: The outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, centred around Mexico City, appears to be abating but caution is still advised. Check the BBC for news updates, plus the Thorn Tree travel forum and Lonely Planet Blog for a range of helpful resources.

Marvelling at a 1300-year-old Maya palace at Palenque as parrots screech and howler monkeys growl in the sweaty emerald jungle around you. This is Mexico. Sliding from a palm-fringed sandy beach into the warm, turquoise waves of the Pacific at Puerto Vallarta. This, too, is Mexico. Dining on salmon enchiladas and chrysanthemum salad at a Mexico City fusion restaurant, dancing through the night at a high-energy Guadalajara nightclub, kayaking at dawn past a colony of Baja California sea lions – all these are unique Mexican experiences. Every visitor goes home with their own unforgettable images. Such a large country, straddling temperate and tropical zones, reaching 5km into the sky and stretching 10, 000km along its coasts, with a city of 19 million people at its center and countless tiny pueblos everywhere, can hardly fail to provide a huge variety of options for human adventure.

Mexico is what you make of it. Its multi-billion-dollar tourism industry is adept at satisfying those who like their travel easy. But adventure is what you’ll undoubtedly have if you take a just a few steps off the pre-packaged path. Activity-based tourism, community tourism and genuine ecotourism – the type that actually helps conserve local environments – are developing fast in rural areas. The opportunities for getting out to Mexico’s spectacular wild places and interacting with local communities are greater than ever – from world-class canyoneering near Monterrey or cooking lessons in the Veracruz countryside to hiking the Oaxaca cloud forests and snorkeling the coral reefs of the Yucatán.

Mexico’s cities still juxtapose manicured poodles and begging grandmothers, but are increasingly sophisticated places with slick restaurants and coffee houses, ever-better cultural and entertainment offerings, and parks and pedestrian areas where you can escape the grinding, polluting traffic. A hip, bohemian, student-based, artsy scene reveling in Mexico’s thriving music and art currents has emerged in most cities. This creative country is enjoying a deserved resurgence of international acclaim and interest in its art, its movies, its design, its music and its cuisine. Even Mexico’s hotels and inns have jumped aboard the ship of style and design. The country’s lodgings are charming, tasteful and appealing, often designed using combinations of contemporary and traditional styles, and always with that bold use of color in which Mexico has long specialized.

Whether this burgeoning of creativity has anything to do with the political changes the country has seen since the dying years of the 20th century may be debated for a long time. Mexico at last threw off eight decades of ‘one-party democracy’ under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 2000, when it voted Vicente Fox of the right-of-center PAN (National Action Party) into the presidency, in the first presidential vote held since the PRI itself had finally reformed the corrupt electoral system.

The Fox presidency disappointed most people on most scores. There are no easy panaceas for the deep-seated economic inequalities between one Mexican and another, and between Mexico and the US, nor to other problems such as the growing might of Mexico’s ruthlessly violent drug gangs. Nevertheless, the Fox era did see an increasing opening and confidence in Mexican society, encouraged by the new regulations on electoral and governmental transparency.

Vicente Fox was succeeded in 2006 by a second PAN president, Felipe Calderón. Whether or not Calderón finds any answers that Fox and the PRI didn’t, one certainty is that Mexicans’ longer-term enduring qualities that contribute so much to the pleasure of visiting their country – their creativity, their warmth, their strong family and community bonds, their refreshingly relaxed pace of life – will outlive his six-year term of office.

Travel Alert: The level of drug-related violence throughout Mexico is a major problem, with the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango and northern Baja California the worst affected. Tourists are not specifically targeted, but any travellers visiting these areas, and in particular the cities of Ciudad Juárez, Nogales and Tijuana should exercise extreme caution. Check Safe Travel for current government warnings.

Last updated: 08-May-2009

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More about Mexico

Latest headlines for Mexico

From BBC News

Crime campaigner killed in Mexico

9 July 2009 11:26AM

An anti-crime activist and his brother-in-law are killed in northern Mexico - with suspicion falling on criminal gangs.

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Mexico's PRI stages poll comeback

6 July 2009 3:00PM

The PRI is set to be the biggest party in Mexico's Congress after defeating President Calderon's party in mid-term elections.

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Missing paedophile back in prison

3 July 2009 1:09PM

A convicted child sex offender is back in prison after being tracked down in Mexico through a "most wanted" website.

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