Mexican cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 6 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Mexico guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 13 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Mexico City

The city is the most populous in North America, with about 9.2 million people in the sixteen alcaldías and some 21 million in the wider valley. It stands where Tenochtitlan stood, on an island in a lake that the Spanish spent three centuries draining, and the cathedral and the palace on the main square are built on the rubble of the Aztec ceremonial center. The water it pumps out from under itself is the reason the ground is going down.

Guadalajara

Guadalajara holds about 1.4 million people in the municipality and 5.3 million across the metropolitan area, the third largest in Mexico. It was founded in 1542 after three earlier attempts on other sites were abandoned or burned. Mariachi took its modern form in the countryside around it, and the town of Tequila is about sixty kilometers to the northwest under the volcano of the same name.

Monterrey

Monterrey anchors the second largest metropolitan area in the country at about 5.3 million people, and it is the wealthiest large city in Mexico. It sits in a gap in the Sierra Madre Oriental under the split peak of the Cerro de la Silla, and it grew on steel: the Fundidora foundry opened in 1900 and ran until 1986, and its site is now the park in the middle of the city.

Tijuana

Tijuana is the largest city in Baja California and one of the largest in northern Mexico. The San Ysidro crossing into San Diego is the busiest land border crossing in the world, with tens of millions of crossings a year, and the two cities work as one labor market split by a fence. Prohibition in the United States built the town: the bars and the racetrack were on this side of the line from 1920.

Ciudad Juárez

Juárez faces El Paso across the Rio Grande and was called El Paso del Norte itself until 1888, when it was renamed for Benito Juárez, who ran the republic from here during the French intervention. It is the largest city in Chihuahua and one of the first places the maquiladora program put assembly plants, in 1965, which is the shape of the border economy that followed.

Cancún

Cancún did not exist in 1970. The site was chosen by the Mexican government, partly by computer model, as somewhere to build a resort city from nothing, and a few hundred people lived in the area when the work started. It is now the most populous city in Quintana Roo and its airport is the busiest in the country for international arrivals.

Mérida

Mérida was founded in 1542 on the Maya city of Tʼhó, and the stone of the older buildings went into the cathedral, which was finished in 1598 and is one of the oldest on the American mainland. The city grew rich on henequen, the agave fiber that made the world’s binder twine, and the mansions along the Paseo de Montejo were built with it.

Acapulco

The bay here is deep and nearly circular, which made it the American end of the Manila galleon route: from 1565 until 1815 a ship came in from the Philippines once a year with silk and porcelain and left with silver. In the 1950s it was the resort Hollywood flew to. Hurricane Otis came ashore as a category 5 storm in October 2023 after strengthening faster than almost any storm on record.

Veracruz

Veracruz is the oldest European-founded city in Mexico, established by Hernán Cortés in 1519, and it has been the country’s main Atlantic port ever since. Everything that arrived from Spain arrived here, and so did every invasion: the Americans in 1847 and again in 1914, the French twice. The state capital is Xalapa, in the hills 90 kilometers inland, not this city.

Oaxaca

The city sits at about 1,550 meters where three valleys meet, and its historic center is a World Heritage Site along with Monte Albán on the ridge above it. Benito Juárez, the only indigenous president Mexico has had, was born in the state and studied here. The cooking of these valleys, and its seven moles, is the reason a good deal of the country comes to eat.

La Paz

La Paz is the capital of Baja California Sur and its largest city, with about 250,000 people. Pearls made it: the oyster beds in the gulf here were fished from the sixteenth century and fished out by the 1940s. The ferry to Mazatlán and Topolobampo across the water is still how most freight reaches the southern half of the peninsula.

Chihuahua

Chihuahua City is the capital of the largest state in the country and stands at about 1,440 meters on the high plain east of the Sierra Madre. Miguel Hidalgo, who began the war of independence, was tried and shot here in 1811. Pancho Villa lived in the city in his last years, and the house is now the museum of the revolution.

Puebla

Puebla was laid out on empty ground in 1531 as a Spanish town on the road from the coast to the capital, which is why its center is a grid rather than a Mexican city rebuilt on an older one. The Talavera pottery made here has been produced since the sixteenth century. The battle of 5 May 1862, in which a smaller Mexican force beat the French army outside the city, is what Cinco de Mayo remembers.

How this one works

The other maps of Mexico

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Mexico atlas page, the country itself on the Mexico guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.