Northern Mexico Region Guide

Northern Mexico is the half of the country most visitors skip, and it contains one of the great railway journeys on earth.

The Chepe railway runs from the Pacific at Los Mochis up into the Sierra Madre Occidental and across the Copper Canyon — a system of six linked canyons, collectively larger and in places deeper than the Grand Canyon, home to the Raramuri people, who are known for running extraordinary distances in sandals cut from tyres.

Monterrey is Mexico’s industrial and business capital, ringed by limestone mountains with world-class rock climbing an hour from the centre.

And the desert holds real oddities: the Cave of Crystals at Naica with gypsum beams eleven metres long, the spring-fed pools of Cuatro Cienegas where stromatolites still grow, and Paquime, an adobe city of the fourteenth century.

It is also the home of norteno music, cabrito and flour tortillas.

The Chepe and the Copper Canyon

The Chihuahua al Pacifico railway climbs from sea level at Los Mochis to 2,400 metres, through 86 tunnels and over 37 bridges, in one of the last great passenger rail journeys. Break the trip at Divisadero, where the train pauses at a viewpoint over three canyons at once, and at Creel for the Raramuri villages, the Cusarare falls and the strange rock formations at the Valle de los Monjes.

Into the canyon

Down to Batopilas, a former silver town on the canyon floor at 500 metres where it is subtropical while the rim is in frost, with a lost cathedral in the hills above it.

Monterrey

The Macroplaza and the MARCO contemporary art museum, the Fundidora park built in a former steelworks, and Chipinque and the Huasteca canyon for hiking and climbing on the doorstep.

Desert oddities

Cuatro Cienegas’s turquoise pools and gypsum dunes, Paquime at Casas Grandes with its adobe walls and macaw pens, and the cave paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco’s eastern counterparts.

Colonial silver

Zacatecas and Durango, both built on silver, with cathedrals of extraordinary carved facades.

Northern Mexico thinks of itself as a different country from the centre and south, and to a degree it is.

Frontier culture

The north was thinly populated, arid and dangerous for centuries — a frontier against nomadic peoples rather than a settled agricultural society like the centre. That produced a culture that prizes self-reliance, work and directness, and northerners have a reputation in Mexico for being blunt, tall, practical and slightly humourless about it.

The United States next door

The border runs for three thousand kilometres and the north lives with it: manufacturing for American supply chains, families split across it, and a constant traffic of people, money and music in both directions. Monterrey in particular is economically closer to Texas than to Mexico City.

Indigenous north

The Raramuri of the Copper Canyon — who call themselves that, meaning light-footed — retreated into the sierra rather than submit and retain their language, religion and long-distance running tradition. The Yaqui of Sonora fought the Mexican state into the twentieth century and keep their deer dance.

Music

Norteno, with accordion and bajo sexto, came from German and Czech immigrants’ polka meeting Mexican song, and banda from Sinaloa. Both dominate northern radio.

Cuatro Cienegas is the region’s ecological jewel and its most threatened place: a basin of spring-fed pools holding stromatolites — living microbial structures of a kind that dominated the earth billions of years ago — and dozens of endemic species found nowhere else. The pools are drying because groundwater is pumped for alfalfa. Visit only the designated pools, do not enter the water where prohibited, and use no sunscreen before swimming where it is allowed.

The Raramuri in the Copper Canyon live in dispersed settlements and face real poverty. Buy baskets and carvings directly, pay properly, ask before photographing, and use community-based guides — several canyon communities run their own tourism.

Water is the northern constraint everywhere; this is desert with intensive agriculture on top of it.

Do not drive off-road in the desert, where crusts and cactus recover over decades.

Check security advice carefully and honestly for each state before travelling.

October to April is the comfortable season across most of the north: warm days, cold nights in the desert and mountains, and clear air. This is the time to go.

Spring and autumn are the best for the Copper Canyon, where the altitude range means the rim can be near freezing while the canyon floor is hot.

May to September is severe. Northern Mexico records the country’s highest temperatures, regularly above 42°C in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and in Monterrey, and it is genuinely dangerous to be out in the middle of the day.

July to September brings the monsoon to the sierra, with dramatic afternoon storms, flash floods and the desert briefly green.

Semana Santa at Easter is when the Raramuri hold their most important ceremonies in the canyon villages, and when the Yaqui and Mayo of Sonora perform the deer dance.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

Monterrey is priced as a business city rather than a tourist one. Everywhere else in the north is inexpensive, and the Chepe is the single significant cost of a canyon trip.