10 BEST Places to Visit in Mexico

María's grandmother came from a village near Catemaco. She used to say the lake there has two reputations, one for tourists who look at it and one for locals who know better than to swim past a certain point after dark.

The ritual and healing traditions practised around the Tuxtlas mountains trace back to Olmec territory, reshaped over centuries by Totonac and Nahua practice rather than invented from nothing. María's grandmother had one simple rule for the whole trip.

If a church bell rings at an odd hour with no service scheduled, ask someone local why. In her experience the answer was never boring, and that rule turned out to be the single most useful thing anyone told us.

María, in the back of a colectivo outside Catemaco: My abuela always said the tourists photograph the lake and the locals listen to it. Only one of those actually tells you anything.

1 Catemaco

We reached Catemaco on a Thursday evening, a five hour bus ride south from Veracruz city that cost us barely more than a couple of tacos each. María had timed it deliberately, wanting us settled in before the following Friday, when the town holds its annual national and international gathering of brujos, curanderos and healers, a tradition drawing practitioners from across Mexico every March.

We checked into a small family run posada two streets back from the lake, cheap enough that María paid cash without blinking, and dropped our bags before walking straight into town. Shopfronts along the main street openly advertise limpias and herbal cleansings, no different from a pharmacy sign, and María's own cousin twenty minutes away has gone to the same healer for stomach troubles since childhood.

The next morning we hired a boatman at the lakeside dock, haggling briefly and settling on a fair price for a two hour loop. He took us past Nanciyaga's rainforest edge and out to Agaltepec, a small island where Thai stumptail macaques now live, imported decades ago for university research and never removed.

Partway through, he pointed toward a quiet cove and told us his own mother refuses to swim there, believing the water holds something he never fully explained even to him. We ate grilled tegogolo, a local river snail, with lime and chile at a palapa stall by the shore afterward, paying almost nothing for a plate that easily fed us both.

María admitted the boat ride had rattled her slightly more than she expected, despite growing up only a few hours away. We spent that second night walking the market stalls near the plaza, buying a small woven bag from a stallholder who threw in a second one when María mentioned we still had ten more stops ahead of us.

2 Tlacotalpan

The drive from Catemaco to Tlacotalpan followed the Papaloapan river most of the way in a shared van María flagged down on the highway. We timed our arrival for early February, close enough to the town's Candelaria festival that shopkeepers were already restringing paper decorations across the colonnaded streets.

Tlacotalpan earned its UNESCO World Heritage status for pastel colonnaded houses laid out in a colonial grid barely changed in centuries, and for son jarocho music still played live on porches most evenings. We stayed two nights in a guesthouse converted from one of those colonnaded homes, cheap by any standard, its owner leaving a thermos of coffee outside our door each morning without being asked.

The Candelaria festival itself includes running young bulls loose through the streets down to the river, a tradition with genuine controversy attached, and María and I argued about it gently over dinner without landing on a tidy conclusion. What nobody disputes is the music.

We sat on the edge of the main plaza past ten at night listening to an unplanned son jarocho session that had drawn a small crowd purely by starting, no stage, no announcement. We bought grilled corn from a cart nearby and stayed until the musicians themselves finally packed up, well past midnight.

3 San José del Pacífico

We climbed into the Sierra Madre del Sur from Oaxaca City on a local bus that took the mountain switchbacks slowly enough that María fell asleep twice. San José del Pacífico appeared out of genuine fog, cabins and coffee stalls emerging one at a time as the road climbed.

The town is widely known across Mexico for long standing Mazatec and Zapotec traditions involving ceremonial mushroom use, a subject it is fairly open about historically. The substance remains legally controlled, and I am not going to describe how, where or in what amount anyone might use it, since that is not something I am equipped or willing to advise on.

What I can describe honestly is the mountain itself. We rented a wooden cabin with a single space heater for the night, cheaper than a mid range hotel back in the city, and bought coffee grown on the slopes just below town from a small roaster who let us taste three different lots before we chose.

We watched sunset from a viewpoint where the clouds sit visibly below the road rather than above it, an inversion so complete that María, who has seen it several times, stopped talking mid sentence to watch it happen. A woman running a small comedor told us her own grandmother used to walk two hours down the mountain every week to sell woven goods, a walk the bus now covers in about fifteen minutes.

She said it with pride rather than pity, as though the old way was simply a different pace of life mountain towns like hers used to run on entirely. We bought a small woven shawl from her before leaving, paying what she asked without haggling, since María said this was not the moment for it.

4 Lagunas de Chacahua

Getting to Chacahua from Puerto Escondido means either a long dirt road drive or a boat from the small village of Zapotalito. María insisted on the boat, a forty five minute run through mangrove channels that opened periodically into wide, still lagoon water where herons stood motionless on half submerged branches.

The park, protected since 1937, sits where two cultures rarely mentioned together meet, Mixtec communities and Afro Mexican fishing villages descended from the Costa Chica's long documented Black Mexican population. Both still run the boats and the lagoonside palapa restaurants lining the water.

We stopped at a small crocodile hatchery on the lagoon's western shore, where Mexican Pacific crocodiles are raised from hatchlings after decades of overhunting nearly wiped the population out. Our boat driver, a Zapotalito local whose family has fished these channels for three generations, walked us past the pens with the easy familiarity of someone checking on livestock.

We ate fresh oysters shucked to order at a lagoonside stall, cheap enough that we ordered a second round without thinking twice, and stayed the night in a simple palapa room right on the water. After dark we swam in a patch where disturbed plankton lights up faintly around any movement, María laughing every time I flinched at my own glowing hands.

5 Xilitla

Xilitla sits in the Huasteca Potosina, reached by a winding mountain road from San Luis Potosí. María had been talking about this stop since before we left Veracruz, since her own father visited as a young man and never stopped describing it.

Las Pozas, the surrealist garden built into the jungle by the British poet and eccentric patron Edward James starting in 1949 and continuing until his death in 1984, is not a museum piece behind glass. It is dozens of enormous, deliberately unfinished concrete structures rising directly out of the rainforest canopy, staircases leading nowhere, doorframes opening onto empty air, all built around natural waterfalls and pools that give the site its name.

We booked a small guesthouse in town, walking distance from the entrance, and spent a full afternoon climbing through the garden itself. Many of the local workers James employed over three decades were Huastec labourers from Xilitla, and their descendants still work as guides and groundskeepers on the same property today, a direct multigenerational thread most visitors walk straight past without knowing.

Standing on a stone staircase that ends abruptly in open air above a waterfall, with howler monkeys audible somewhere in the canopy below, felt less like visiting art and more like walking through someone's genuinely unfinished dream. That evening we ate at a small comedor in the main square, María ordering enchiladas huastecas specifically because her father had described them to her for years, and pronouncing them exactly as good as promised.

6 Cañón de Matacanes

This one happened on a separate trip north, since Matacanes sits outside Monterrey rather than anywhere near María's usual routes. She came along because a cousin of hers works as a canyoneering guide out of the nearby village of Potrero Redondo.

The canyon was first fully descended in the early 1980s by a guide named Mauricio Garza, who named it Matacanes, roughly meaning kill the dogs, after a rough early expedition. His outfit, still tied closely to the local Potrero Redondo community, remains one of the operations guiding the canyon today.

We spent a full nine hour day working through it, roughly twelve kilometres of river canyon, dozens of jumps into clear pools, two rappels each around twenty to thirty metres, and a stretch of pitch dark underground tunnel where the only sound was water and our own breathing. We slept that night in a simple cabin arranged by María's cousin, cold beer and grilled meat waiting for us at a small comedor nearby that clearly exists mainly to feed exhausted canyoneers.

María's cousin mentioned that before the road into Potrero Redondo improved, early canyoneers based themselves out of a hotel near the Cola de Caballo waterfall and made the long predawn drive out every single time. That level of commitment to a sport most of Mexico had never heard of struck me as its own kind of quiet obsession.

7 Mineral del Chico

A shorter detour from Mexico City, Mineral del Chico was founded in the late 1500s after silver veins were discovered nearby, part of a mining region that eventually produced an estimated six percent of the world's silver. We stayed in a small hotel just off the main square, its red tiled roof matching every other building in town, cheap for what felt like a genuinely well kept room.

The national park surrounding the town has quietly become one of the world's most respected bouldering destinations since local climbers began developing routes on its volcanic rock in 2003. Our guesthouse host walked us up toward Las Monjas, a cluster of granite pillars visible even from town, and told us the local legend attached to them.

Two young women from El Chico were locked away in a convent by their own families generations ago, escaped one night into the forest, and were transformed into these same rock formations by a mysterious light while praying to be forgiven. Every local seems to know the story slightly differently in its details but never in its ending.

We watched a small group of climbers working a boulder problem barefoot at the base of the rocks as the light went gold. María noted quietly that it was strange to think of two entirely different kinds of devotion, the old religious kind and the newer physical kind, happening on the exact same stone.

8 Sierra de San Pedro Mártir

Getting here meant a long drive down the Baja peninsula from Ensenada, climbing a paved but narrow road gaining over nine thousand feet in about sixty miles. Pine forest replaced desert so gradually that María, who had never been to this part of Baja despite growing up hundreds of miles south, kept asking if we had crossed into a different country.

The park protects one of the only pine forests on the entire peninsula and the highest point in Baja California, Picacho del Diablo, also known by the gentler name Cerro de la Encantada. We booked a daytime tour of the National Astronomical Observatory at the summit, home to Mexico's largest telescope.

The ranger leading our small group told us California condors, extinct in Baja since 1937, were reintroduced here starting in 2002 using birds bred in Los Angeles, San Diego and Chapultepec zoos. Around forty now live wild in these mountains, far more than most visitors expect when they think of Baja as nothing but beach and desert.

We camped that night at nearly nine thousand feet, cold enough that María borrowed my second jacket without asking, cooking a simple pot of beans over a small camp stove for dinner. The sky was dark enough that the Milky Way cast a faint shadow, exactly the reason Mexico's own astronomers chose this ridge back in 1967.

9 Pátzcuaro

We timed this stop for the first of November on purpose, checking into a colonial guesthouse near the main plaza in Pátzcuaro town that afternoon. That evening we bought marigolds and pan de muerto from a market stall before taking a boat across the lake to Janitzio.

Our boat joined a slow procession of candlelit canoes crossing water that Purépecha tradition holds as a literal gateway between the living and the dead. María had heard the local legend of Mintzita, a Purépecha princess, and her lover Itzihuapa long before we arrived, and told it to me properly for the first time as our own boat crossed that same water.

On the island we watched mariposero fishermen fan their traditional butterfly shaped nets in a slow, ceremonial motion Purépecha belief says helps guide returning souls up from the water toward the cemetery stairs. The fishing method has become more performance than livelihood as the lake's fish stocks declined, though María pointed out the families doing it are the same families who always have, adapted rather than invented.

We spent the whole night in the cemetery itself, sitting a respectful distance from a family's candlelit grave as they shared bread and drink with relatives who had died decades apart. Cold wind moved through the marigolds well past three in the morning, and neither of us spoke much on the boat back to shore.

10 Calakmul

Reaching Calakmul from the nearest town of Xpujil takes over an hour on a single road cutting through unbroken biosphere reserve. We stayed the night before at a simple ecolodge in Xpujil, cheap and basic, waking well before dawn to beat the jungle heat.

María's own mother, who studied archaeology briefly before switching careers, had drilled into her exactly why this site mattered before we ever set foot near it. Calakmul was the capital of the Kaan, or Snake, dynasty, the rival power that fought Tikal for control of the entire Maya lowlands for more than a century, a rivalry epigraphers only fully understood once hieroglyphic texts were decoded in the 1990s.

The city remained lost to outsiders until its rediscovery from the air in 1931. We climbed Structure II, one of the largest pyramids in the Maya world, in near total silence apart from birdsong, seeing fewer than a dozen other visitors across three hours at the site.

Our guide, a Xpujil local who has worked the site for over a decade, pointed out a stela near the base of the pyramid. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that Calakmul briefly defeated Tikal outright in 562, a war most visitors to either site have never heard named, as consequential to Maya history as Rome and Carthage were to the Mediterranean.

We ate a simple lunch of tamales wrapped in banana leaf back in Xpujil that evening, bought from a woman selling them out of a cooler on her porch. María said the tamales alone were worth the early wake up call.