Discover North America

A continent of vast national parks, global mega-cities, and three countries linked by deep cultural and economic ties.

North America spans Arctic tundra, desert canyons, dense rainforest, and the skylines of some of the world's most recognized cities, all within Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Whether the draw is a national park road trip, a weekend in a world-capital city, or ancient ruins on the Yucatán coast, North America offers scale and variety that few other continents can match.

North America here covers Canada, Mexico, and the United States — three countries that, despite sharp differences in language, history, and wealth, are bound together by one of the world's most integrated trade relationships and thousands of miles of shared border. Geographically it stretches from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico, covering more climate zones than almost any other single continental grouping on the site.

What distinguishes North America for a visitor is the sheer range of experience available inside a familiar travel framework. English is the primary language across the United States and most of Canada; Spanish is Mexico's national language and is also widely spoken in the southern and southwestern United States, home to large Hispanic populations; and French is Canada's other official language, the first language of most of Quebec and of significant communities in New Brunswick and eastern Ontario. Infrastructure is generally reliable throughout, and getting between destinations rarely requires the logistics some other regions do. That ease of access doesn't make the destinations themselves any less distinctive: Indigenous nations across all three countries maintain living cultures and histories that predate European contact by thousands of years, and Mexico's own pre-Columbian civilizations left some of the most significant archaeological sites anywhere in the world.

The three countries are often visited separately rather than as a single continental trip, and each has its own well-developed tourism identity — Canada's wilderness and cities, the United States' scale and variety, Mexico's ancient sites, beaches, and colonial towns — but all three share the continent's defining trait: an enormous amount of room to cover real distance and see real difference.

North America's defining feature is its north-south spine: the Rocky Mountains run from Alaska down through western Canada and the United States before continuing as Mexico's Sierra Madre ranges, forming a mountainous backbone the entire length of the continent. East of the Rockies, the Great Plains stretch across the continental interior — some of the flattest, most agriculturally productive land on Earth — before rising again into the older, more worn-down Appalachian Mountains near the Atlantic coast.

The Great Lakes, holding roughly a fifth of the world's surface fresh water, sit at the US-Canada border and have shaped settlement, trade, and industry across the region for centuries. Further south, Mexico's geography grows more complex: the central highlands and their volcanic peaks give way to the Yucatán Peninsula's flat limestone shelf, riddled with underground rivers and cenotes rather than surface streams.

Coastlines vary just as widely — the rugged, fjord-cut coast of British Columbia and Alaska bears little resemblance to the long, flat beaches of the Gulf of Mexico or the volcanic Pacific coast of southern Mexico, giving the continent a genuinely different coastal character depending on where you are.

North America's size means it holds nearly every climate type that exists, often within a single country. Northern Canada sits in the Arctic and subarctic, with long, severe winters and a short summer; the interior plains of both Canada and the United States have a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters with limited moderating effect from any ocean.

The Pacific coast tells a different story — Vancouver and Seattle sit in a temperate maritime zone with mild, wet winters, while California further south shifts into a Mediterranean climate of dry summers and wet winters. The American Southwest and much of northern Mexico are arid to semi-arid desert, some of the driest inhabited land on the continent.

Moving further south into Mexico, climate becomes governed less by season and more by elevation and coastline — the central highlands stay mild year-round regardless of month, while the Yucatán and Pacific coastal lowlands are properly tropical, with a clear wet season (roughly June–October) rather than four traditional seasons at all.