Mexican states, found on the map
Thirty-one states and the capital, from Baja California at the top of the western peninsula to Chiapas on the Guatemalan border. Every question can be reasoned out from the shape of the country, whether it is the largest one, the one wrapped around the capital, or the one that ends at a cape.
32 to find, 8 a run.
4 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.
32 states · 4 regions
What the map tells you about each one
The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for the 14 of the 32 that have one. Reading them first is not cheating.
Northern Mexico9 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapCoahuila · Durango · Sinaloa · Tamaulipas
West Mexico and the Bajío9 on the map
- 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.
Also on the mapAguascalientes · Colima · Guanajuato · Michoacán · Nayarit · Querétaro · San Luis Potosí · Zacatecas
Central Mexico6 on the map
- 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.
Also on the mapHidalgo · Morelos · Puebla · Tlaxcala
The south, the Gulf and Yucatán8 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapCampeche · Tabasco
How this one works
How many states are on the map?
32. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.
What is a round?
A run of 8 questions, and 6 right passes it. 4 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the Mexico page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. A round is always the places you have not found yet, and when fewer than five are left it is topped up with a few you have found as review, so the last round is never one or two questions. Three quarters of it passes it.
Can I start the map over?
Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 32 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of Mexico keep their progress.
Do I need an account?
No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.
What happens when I get one wrong?
The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.
The other maps of Mexico
The same map for other countries
North America
Oceania
South America
All of Mexico’s maps together on the Mexico atlas page, the country itself on the Mexico guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.