Tourism searches on Google showed Mexico City as not just a Latin American Favorite, but in the top five tourist searches in the world. Last year, at about this time, The New York Times had named the city the number one travel destination for 2016. That’s more than it’s entire metro-population (though not by much). Not just in terms of the space it occupies and the stone and brick from it’s made from, but Mexico City greeted more than 30 million visitors last year. Mexico City is vibrant, vast and very important. With more visitors than any place else in the region, Mexico City is Latin America’s Favorite for good reason. Many visitors to Mexico City will spend weeks here without witnessing even one. And to that very absence, their sudden reappearance can strike visitors, like a parent we’d thought had gone. Still, Mexico City’s mountains aren’t always obvious. Only seven of the 25 central Mexican volcanoes are considered dangerous. But wait! These two just happen to end, more or less, at the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt which accounts for quite a string of volcanoes that extend right across the central part of Mexico.īut don’t worry. Mexico City rests at the confluence of the two. In the West of the country are the Sierra Madre Occidental and in the east, the Sierra Madre Oriental. Both mountain ranges extend south from the US border, and between them is the high Mexican Plateau. Mexico City’s mountains, though, easily reach 5,000 meters. Surrounded by these strident ranges, cliffs, summits and volcanoes, the city is notoriously built up from the base of a lake which flooded the great basin annually until only the past century.Īt it’s lowest, the Valley of Mexico is a good 2,200 meters above sea level. Mexico City’s mountains may not ever be the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Mexico City.” But noted Mexican philosopher and diplomat, Alfonso Reyes, once described the city thus, “In the middle of the salty lake sits the metropolis, like an immense flower of stone and surrounded by a spacious circus of mountains.” Mexico City occupies the grand base of a massive bowl formed by the meeting of two mountain ranges.
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