Mexican states, 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 14 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Chihuahua

Chihuahua covers about 247,000 square kilometers, which is a little larger than the United Kingdom, and its border runs against both New Mexico and Texas. Its largest city is Ciudad Juárez rather than the capital, Chihuahua City, where Miguel Hidalgo was executed on 30 July 1811. Parral, in the south of the state, was the largest producer of silver in the world in 1640. The Barrancas del Cobre in the west are a system of canyons cut into the Sierra Madre Occidental, several of them deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Baja California

The peninsula is split at the 28th parallel, and this is the half above it, about 70,000 square kilometers plus Guadalupe Island out in the Pacific. It was a territory rather than a state until 1952. Tijuana is much its largest city, but the capital is Mexicali, at the far eastern end of the state on the delta of the Colorado, where the border leaves the river and runs straight west to the Pacific.

Baja California Sur

Admitted in 1974, this was the 31st and last state to join the federation, and it is the least densely populated of them: a peninsula about 750 kilometers long with fewer than a million people on it. La Paz, the capital, is on the gulf side rather than the Pacific. The desert here runs the whole width of the land, so almost every town is on one coast or the other.

Yucatán

The state is flat limestone with no rivers on it. Rain sinks straight through, which is why the fresh water is underground and reached through cenotes, and why a ring of them traces the rim of the Chicxulub crater along the northern coast. The crater is about 200 kilometers across, buried a kilometer down, and was left by an asteroid some ten kilometers wide a little over 66 million years ago. Mérida, the capital, was founded in 1542 on top of the Maya city of Tʼhó.

Quintana Roo

Quintana Roo became a state in 1974, the same year as Baja California Sur, and it holds only eleven municipalities. Its capital is Chetumal, in the far south on the Belize border, rather than Cancún, which is where nearly everybody arriving in the state lands. The reef along this coast is the northern end of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the largest in the Americas.

Jalisco

Jalisco is where a good deal of what the rest of the world reads as Mexican comes from: mariachi, the charreada, and tequila, which can only be called that if the agave was grown here or in a handful of municipalities in four other states. Guadalajara, the capital, anchors the third largest metropolitan area in the country at about 5.3 million people. Lake Chapala, on its southern border, is the largest freshwater lake in Mexico.

Oaxaca

Oaxaca is divided into 570 municipalities, more than a fifth of every municipality in Mexico, and 418 of them are governed by usos y costumbres rather than by party politics. It is the most linguistically diverse state in the country, with sixteen recognized indigenous peoples. Monte Albán, on a leveled ridge above the capital, was the Zapotec capital from about 500 BC and is a World Heritage Site.

Chiapas

Chiapas was part of Guatemala until 1824, when it voted to join Mexico instead. It is mountainous, wet and poor, and it generates a large share of the country’s hydroelectricity from four dams on the Grijalva. The Zapatista uprising began here on 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force. Palenque, in the north of the state, is the Maya city whose inscriptions did most to let the script be read.

Veracruz

Veracruz is about 700 kilometers long and rarely more than 200 wide, which gives it more Gulf coast than any other state. Its capital is Xalapa, in the hills, rather than the port of Veracruz on the coast below. Pico de Orizaba stands on its border with Puebla at 5,636 meters, the highest mountain in Mexico and the highest volcano in North America.

Sonora

Sonora holds most of the Sonoran desert, which is why the Gran Desierto de Altar in its northwest is the largest field of sand dunes in North America. Its capital is Hermosillo, in the middle of the state, and its border runs against Arizona. The Yaqui river, dammed three times on its way down, waters the irrigated valley around Ciudad Obregón where the wheat breeding of the Green Revolution was done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nuevo León

Nuevo León is 64,156 square kilometers with about 5.8 million people, and its border with Texas is only some fifteen kilometers long, squeezed between Coahuila and Tamaulipas. Monterrey, its capital, sits in a gap in the Sierra Madre Oriental about 230 kilometers from that border and is the industrial center of the country. The state has drawn a large share of Mexican manufacturing for the same reason: it is the last stop before the road north.

Ciudad de México

The capital stopped being the Distrito Federal in 2016 and is now a federal entity with a constitution of its own, divided into sixteen alcaldías. It sits in the Valley of Mexico at about 2,240 meters, on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, which is why parts of it are sinking by tens of centimeters a year and why the ground shakes harder here than the distance to an earthquake would suggest.

Estado de México

This is the most populous state in the country with about 17 million people, most of them in the ring of municipalities that has grown into the capital: Nezahualcóyotl and Ecatepec are among the largest cities in Mexico and are on nobody’s tourist map. Its capital is Toluca, west of the ring. Teotihuacan, the city that built the Pyramid of the Sun and was already a ruin when the Aztecs found it, is in its northeastern corner.

Guerrero

Guerrero is named after Vicente Guerrero, the independence leader who became president in 1829 and abolished slavery in his first year. Its capital is Chilpancingo, in the interior, while its largest city by far is Acapulco on the coast. The state is mountainous almost everywhere the Balsas does not run, which is much of why the road from the capital to the sea took until 1927 to build.

How this one works

The other maps of Mexico

India has the same map in Indian states. United States has the same map in American states. Germany has the same map in German states. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian states. All three together on the Mexico atlas page, the country itself on the Mexico guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.