Mexican rivers, lakes and seas, 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. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 18 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Gulf of Mexico

The Gulf is a nearly closed basin about 1,600 kilometers across, connected to the Atlantic through the Straits of Florida and to the Caribbean through the Yucatán Channel. Water comes in around Cuba, loops north and leaves again as the Gulf Stream. It is warm enough through late summer to build hurricanes, and its Mexican side is where most of the country’s oil has come from.

Golfo de California

Also called the Sea of Cortés, this is about 1,100 kilometers of water opened by the peninsula tearing away from the mainland along the same fault system as the San Andreas, and it is still widening. It reaches depths over 3,000 meters, and its islands and reefs hold a third of the world’s marine mammal species. The vaquita, a porpoise found only at its northern end, is down to a handful of animals.

Pacific Ocean

Mexico has some 7,800 kilometers of Pacific coast once the peninsula is counted on both sides, and the ocean floor drops away fast: the Middle America Trench runs parallel to the coast a hundred kilometers or so out, where the Cocos plate goes down under the continent. That subduction is what makes the volcanoes across the middle of the country and what made the 1985 and 2017 earthquakes.

Caribbean Sea

The Mexican Caribbean is a strip of coast about 900 kilometers of it counting the bays, running from the corner of the peninsula down to Belize. The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef lies just offshore for most of that length, the largest reef system in the Americas and the second largest in the world. Cozumel, off the coast, is a limestone island of the same rock as the peninsula.

Bahía de Campeche

The bay is the southwestern lobe of the Gulf of Mexico, and half the Chicxulub crater is under it. Cantarell, discovered in 1976 offshore here, was for a time the second most productive oil field in the world and paid for a large part of the Mexican state through the 1980s and 1990s. Its output has been falling since 2004.

Golfo de Tehuantepec

The isthmus above this bay is only about 200 kilometers wide and low enough that winter high pressure over the Gulf of Mexico spills straight across it. The result is the Tehuano, a wind that blows out over the bay at gale force for days at a time, and it is why the ridges of the isthmus now carry some of the largest wind farms in Latin America.

Rio Grande

Called the Río Bravo del Norte on this side of it, the river runs 3,051 kilometers from the mountains of Colorado to the Gulf, and about two thirds of that is the border. So much is taken out of it for irrigation that in most years the channel at the mouth is dry or nearly so. What water reaches the lower river below Presidio comes mostly from the Conchos, on the Mexican side.

Balsas

The Balsas drains the basin between the volcanic belt and the Sierra Madre del Sur, then cuts through the mountains to the sea. It is dammed near its mouth at Infiernillo, and Lázaro Cárdenas at the outlet is one of the two container ports that handle most of what arrives in Mexico from Asia. Copper was worked in this valley before the Spanish arrived, which made it one of the few places in Mesoamerica with metal tools.

Grijalva

The Grijalva runs through Chiapas in a series of reservoirs, four dams in a chain, and they generate a large share of Mexican hydroelectricity. Above the highest of them the river has cut the Sumidero canyon, whose walls stand about a kilometer over the water. It meets the Usumacinta in the wetlands of Tabasco before either reaches the sea.

Usumacinta

The Usumacinta carries more water than any other river in Mexico and is the longest in Central America. Its middle course is the border with Guatemala, and the Maya cities of Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras face each other across it. Every proposal to dam it has been abandoned, so it is one of the few large rivers in the country still running free.

Río Grande de Santiago

This is the lower half of the Lerma-Santiago, the longest river system in Mexico: the Lerma flows into Lake Chapala from the east and the Santiago flows out of it to the northwest, through a deep barranca below Guadalajara and on to the sea. The system is dammed repeatedly on the way down, and the stretch below Guadalajara is one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

Lerma

The Lerma rises in the highlands west of Mexico City at over 3,000 meters and runs about 750 kilometers west through the Bajío, the farmland that has been the granary of central Mexico since the colonial period. Water is taken from its headwaters to supply the capital, which is one of the reasons the lake it ends in has shrunk.

Yaqui

The Yaqui is the main river of Sonora and is dammed three times on the way down. The valley at its mouth is irrigated wheat country, and it was in the fields around Ciudad Obregón that Norman Borlaug bred the short-stemmed wheats of the Green Revolution through the 1950s. The Yaqui people it is named for fought the Mexican state over this water for most of a century.

Conchos

The Conchos is the largest Mexican tributary of the Rio Grande and reaches it at Ojinaga, opposite Presidio in Texas. Below that junction most of the water in the river is Mexican, which is why the 1944 water treaty between the two countries counts deliveries from this river and why a dry cycle here becomes an argument between governments.

Lago de Chapala

Chapala covers about 1,100 square kilometers and has been the largest freshwater lake in Mexico since Lake Texcoco was drained. It is shallow, rarely more than about ten meters, so what comes down the Lerma and what is taken out for Guadalajara move its level fast: it fell to a fifth of its capacity in the drought of the early 2000s. The shore villages around Ajijic hold one of the largest communities of American and Canadian retirees anywhere.

Laguna Madre

The Laguna Madre is a lagoon some 200 kilometers long and only a few kilometers wide, cut off from the Gulf by sand. Almost no fresh water reaches it and the sun takes more out than the rain puts in, so it is saltier than the sea: one of a handful of hypersaline lagoons in the world, and the winter destination of a large part of the North American waterfowl population.

Presa del Infiernillo

Infiernillo is one of the largest reservoirs in Mexico, held by an earth and rock dam about 148 meters high that was finished in 1964. It sits in the gorge the Balsas cuts through the Sierra Madre del Sur, and the little hell is what that passage was called before there was a lake over it.

Falcon Lake

Falcon is one of two reservoirs the two countries built and run together on the Rio Grande, finished in 1953 and operated by the International Boundary and Water Commission, with the border running down the middle of the water. The dam raised the lake over the town of Old Guerrero, whose church tower comes back out of it whenever the level drops far enough.

How this one works

The other maps of Mexico

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