MexicoMéxico

People in the valleys of Oaxaca and Puebla were domesticating maize, beans and squash thousands of years before the first cities. The Olmecs of the Gulf coast, around 1200 BC, carved colossal stone heads and set patterns — ball courts, calendars, jaguar imagery — that later cultures shared.

Teotihuacán, north-east of today's capital, grew into one of the largest cities in the world by about AD 500, with avenues and apartment compounds laid out around the Pyramid of the Sun. It was already a ruin when the Aztecs named it 'the place where gods were born'.

In the south, Maya city-states such as Palenque, Calakmul and later Chichén Itzá and Uxmal built temples, wrote in hieroglyphs and tracked the planets. They were never a single empire; wars and alliances between cities shaped their history, and Maya languages are still spoken by millions today.

The Mexica, better known as Aztecs, founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. By 1519 it was a city of causeways, canals and markets that ruled a tribute empire across central Mexico. Mexico City is built on top of it, and the Templo Mayor was dug out from under the colonial streets only in the late 1970s.

Hernán Cortés landed in 1519 and, with Indigenous allies who resented Aztec rule and with smallpox on his side, took Tenochtitlan in 1521. The Spanish built New Spain on the Aztec capital, and within a century the Indigenous population had collapsed from epidemics and forced labour.

Silver from Zacatecas and Guanajuato paid for baroque churches and flowed across the world via Manila and Seville. A caste system ranked Spaniards, Creoles, mestizos, Indigenous and African people. In 1810 the priest Miguel Hidalgo rang his church bell in Dolores and called for revolt; independence came in 1821.

The 19th century was violent: Mexico lost Texas and then half its territory in the war with the United States (1846–48), fought off a French-backed emperor, and was reformed by Benito Juárez, an Indigenous Zapotec lawyer from Oaxaca. Porfirio Díaz then ruled for three decades, building railways while land went to a small elite.

The Revolution of 1910–20, with Zapata in the south and Villa in the north, killed perhaps a million people and produced the 1917 constitution, land reform and a single ruling party, the PRI, which held power until 2000. The murals of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros told the revolution's story on public walls.

Mexico has about 130 million people. Most are mestizo, of mixed Indigenous and European descent, and mestizaje became a national ideal after the revolution. About a fifth of Mexicans identify as Indigenous, and around seven million speak an Indigenous language, from Nahuatl in the centre to Maya in the Yucatán and Zapotec and Mixtec in Oaxaca.

Afro-Mexican communities on the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca were recognised in the constitution only in 2019. Lebanese, Spanish, German and Chinese migrants left their marks too, from the tacos al pastor spit to Mennonite cheese in Chihuahua.

Regional identity is strong: norteños, chilangos from the capital, yucatecos and oaxaqueños each have their own accents, food and jokes about each other. Family remains the centre of social life, and Sunday lunch can last all afternoon.

Millions of Mexicans live in the United States, and remittances are one of the country's largest sources of foreign income. The border shapes music, language and politics on both sides.

Mexican cooking rests on nixtamal: maize cooked with lime, which makes it more nutritious and turns it into masa for tortillas, tamales and dozens of snacks. The technique is thousands of years old and still done by hand in markets across the country.

Chillies, beans, tomatoes, cacao, avocados, vanilla and turkey all come from Mexico or its neighbours. The Spanish added pork, beef, cheese, wheat and sugar, and the mix produced dishes such as mole, whose recipes pass through families and convents.

Oaxaca is known as the land of seven moles; Puebla claims mole poblano and chiles en nogada; the Yucatán cooks pork in underground ovens with achiote; the north grills beef on flour tortillas. Street food — tacos, tlacoyos, elotes — is where most Mexicans eat out.

Traditional Mexican cuisine was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010. Mezcal and tequila, both agave spirits, have gone global, raising questions about overharvesting wild agave and fair pay for small producers.

Mexico is one of the world's most biodiverse countries. The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt crosses the centre with peaks such as Pico de Orizaba (about 5,600 m) and Popocatépetl, which still smokes above Puebla. Mexico City sits in a high basin at about 2,240 m, on the bed of a drained lake that amplifies earthquakes.

The north is desert and canyon country: the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and the Copper Canyon system. Baja California's Sea of Cortez is rich enough in marine life that grey whales calve in its lagoons each winter.

The Yucatán Peninsula is a flat limestone shelf with no rivers on the surface. Water runs through underground caves and appears in cenotes, sinkholes the Maya treated as sacred. Offshore, the Mesoamerican Reef runs south to Belize and Honduras.

Since about 2011 huge mats of sargassum seaweed drift onto the Caribbean coast in spring and summer, with record years in the 2020s. Hurricanes hit both coasts between June and November, and building the Tren Maya through the jungle and over cave systems drew protests from scientists and cave divers.

Día de Muertos, on 1 and 2 November, blends pre-Hispanic rituals for the dead with the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Families build ofrendas, altars with photos, marigolds, candles, sugar skulls, pan de muerto and the favourite food and drink of the dead, who are believed to return for a night.

In Oaxaca, Pátzcuaro and Mixquic, families keep vigil in candle-lit cemeteries. Visitors are welcome to watch from a respectful distance; ask before photographing a family's grave.

The large parade in Mexico City began only in 2016, inspired by a James Bond film, and now draws huge crowds. The Catrina, an elegant skeleton lady, comes from José Guadalupe Posada's prints and Diego Rivera's murals.

UNESCO listed the Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead as intangible heritage in 2008. For travellers it is the busiest time in Oaxaca: rooms are booked months ahead and prices rise sharply.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador won in 2018 and his party, Morena, kept power when Claudia Sheinbaum, a scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, became the first woman president in 2024. A 2024 judicial reform moved Mexico to electing its judges, a first in 2025.

Organised crime is the country's hardest problem. Violence is concentrated in states on drug and migration routes, which is why the US State Department and the UK FCDO rate each state separately. Tourist areas are not immune, but most visitors travel without incident by staying on well-used routes and avoiding night roads.

Big projects have reshaped travel: the new Felipe Ángeles airport north of Mexico City, the Tren Maya loop around the Yucatán, and the Interoceanic Corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Mexico co-hosted the 2026 FIFA World Cup in June–July, with matches in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

Entry has gone digital at the big airports, with e-gates instead of paper forms, while states add their own charges such as Quintana Roo's VISITAX. The cruise passenger fee started in 2025 and is rising in steps to 2028.