Facts about Mexico
Capital Mexico City · North America
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Mexico is the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world and the meeting point of two great historical currents, the indigenous civilisations of Mesoamerica and three centuries of Spanish rule. Its 3,145-kilometer border with the United States makes it central to North American trade and migration alike.
Mexico is a federal republic of 31 states plus Mexico City, narrowing from a wide northern desert to a tropical isthmus in the south. Two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental and Oriental, run down either side of a high central plateau, and Mexico City sits on that plateau at about 2,240 meters over the drained bed of a lake, which is why parts of it are sinking. The Tropic of Cancer cuts the country roughly in half, and the flat limestone of the Yucatán in the southeast is riddled with the freshwater sinkholes the Maya depended on.
Greater Mexico City holds over 21 million people and dominates the country politically and culturally. Guadalajara is the home of mariachi and the tequila country around it, Monterrey in the north is the industrial counterweight nearest the American border, and Oaxaca and Puebla are the acknowledged centers of Mexican cooking. Visitors usually choose between the Caribbean resorts and Maya ruins of the Yucatán, the colonial silver towns of the central highlands, and the Pacific coast, with Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacan the two sites almost everyone sees.
- Population
- 130 million
- Area
- 1,964,375 km²
- Currency
- Mexican peso ($)
- Official language
- Spanish, de facto
- States
- 31 states and Mexico City
- Highest point
- Pico de Orizaba, 5,636 m
The Mexico course
Geography of Mexico
Desert to tropics across the Tropic of Cancer, on the Ring of Fire, with a capital that is sinking.
History of Mexico
Olmec, Maya and Aztec, then Cortés, independence, and a revolution that shaped the century.
Language of Mexico
More Spanish speakers than any other country, plus 68 recognized indigenous national languages.
Culture of Mexico
Mestizaje, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Día de Muertos, and murals that retell the national story.
Economy of Mexico
Cars and electronics for the American market, the world’s biggest silver producer, and nearshoring.
Politics of Mexico
A single six-year term with no re-election, and the first woman president elected in 2024.
Nature & Wildlife of Mexico
Megadiverse, first in the world for reptiles, and the monarch butterflies that winter in Michoacán.
Food & Cuisine of Mexico
The first cuisine UNESCO recognized, built on nixtamalised maize and more than a hundred chillies.
Landmarks of Mexico
A pyramid that casts a serpent at the equinox, and a city the Aztecs found already abandoned.
People & Society of Mexico
130 million, four fifths urban, and 11 million Mexican-born people living in the United States.
Geography of Mexico
Mexico narrows from a wide northern desert to a tropical isthmus in the south, with the Sierra Madre Occidental and Sierra Madre Oriental running down either side of a high central plateau. Mexico City sits on that plateau at about 2,240 meters, built over the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, which is why parts of it are sinking several centimeters a year.
The country lies across the Ring of Fire and holds active volcanoes including Popocatépetl near the capital. The Tropic of Cancer cuts the country roughly in half, separating an arid north from a tropical south, and the coastlines face both the Pacific and the Caribbean. The Yucatán Peninsula is flat limestone riddled with cenotes, sinkholes that provided the only fresh water for the Maya.
History of Mexico
Mesoamerica produced a sequence of advanced civilisations, among them the Olmec, the Maya with their writing system and precise astronomical calendars, and the Aztecs, whose capital Tenochtitlan held over 200,000 people when the Spanish arrived. Hernán Cortés took the city in 1521, and disease killed a far larger share of the indigenous population than warfare did.
Three centuries of colonial rule ended with independence in 1821. The 19th century brought the loss of roughly half the national territory to the United States after the war of 1846 to 1848, along with a brief French-installed empire. The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 and produced the 1917 constitution, after which one party, later the PRI, governed continuously until an opposition candidate finally won the presidency in 2000.
Language of Mexico
Mexico has more Spanish speakers than any other country, around 130 million, so Mexican usage carries heavy weight in film, television and publishing across Latin America. Mexican Spanish keeps a formal and informal distinction in address and pronounces the letters c and z as an s sound rather than the Castilian lisp.
The constitution recognizes 68 indigenous languages as national languages alongside Spanish, spoken by roughly seven million people. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, has the most speakers and gave English words including chocolate, tomato, avocado and coyote. Maya languages remain widely spoken across the Yucatán and Chiapas.
Culture of Mexico
Mexican identity rests on mestizaje, the blending of indigenous and Spanish inheritance, and the results are visible in everything from religious practice to cooking. The Virgin of Guadalupe, whose basilica in Mexico City is among the most visited Catholic shrines in the world, fuses Marian devotion with an indigenous setting.
Día de Muertos on the first two days of November honors the dead with altars, marigolds and graveside gatherings, and it holds UNESCO heritage status. Mariachi music from Jalisco is the most recognizable national sound, while the muralists of the 1920s, especially Diego Rivera, turned public walls into a vehicle for retelling Mexican history.
Economy of Mexico
Mexico has one of the largest economies in Latin America and is deeply tied to the United States, which takes roughly 80 percent of its exports. The USMCA agreement, which replaced NAFTA in 2020, keeps most of that trade tariff-free.
Manufacturing dominates, especially cars and auto parts, aerospace components and electronics assembled in border factories known as maquiladoras. Mexico is the largest silver producer in the world and a significant oil exporter through the state company Pemex. Remittances sent home by Mexicans working abroad exceed 60 billion dollars a year, and nearshoring by firms moving production out of Asia has driven fresh industrial investment.
Politics of Mexico
Mexico is a federal presidential republic of 32 states. The president serves a single six-year term, called a sexenio, with no possibility of re-election, a rule dating from the revolution and its reaction against long personal rule.
Congress has a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate, both elected through a mix of direct and proportional seats. After 71 unbroken years of PRI rule ended in 2000, power has alternated between parties, and Claudia Sheinbaum took office in 2024 as the first woman president. Organized crime and the violence around it remain the central challenge to state authority in several states.
Nature & Wildlife of Mexico
Mexico is one of about 17 megadiverse countries that together hold most of the world’s species. It ranks first for reptile diversity and among the top few for mammals, with habitats spanning desert, cloud forest, coral reef and high alpine zones.
Hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies migrate up to 4,800 kilometers from Canada and the United States to overwinter in the oyamel fir forests of Michoacán. The vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of California is the most endangered marine mammal on Earth, with perhaps ten individuals left. Mexico is also the origin point of maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, chillies, vanilla and cacao.
Food & Cuisine of Mexico
Traditional Mexican cuisine was added to the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2010, the first national cuisine to be recognized that way. Its foundation is nixtamalisation, the ancient process of soaking maize in an alkaline solution that makes its nutrients available and produces the dough for tortillas.
Regional cooking varies enormously, from the complex mole sauces of Oaxaca and Puebla, which can run to thirty ingredients, to the slow-roasted cochinita pibil of the Yucatán. Chillies come in more than a hundred varieties, fresh and dried. Tequila and mezcal are both distilled from agave, and each is protected by origin rules tied to specific states.
Landmarks of Mexico
Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán centers on the step pyramid of El Castillo, built so that the equinox sun casts a shadow resembling a serpent descending the staircase. It was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007.
Teotihuacan near Mexico City was already an abandoned ruin when the Aztecs found it and named it the place where the gods were born; its Pyramid of the Sun is among the largest in the world. Other major sites include the Maya city of Palenque in the Chiapas jungle, the colonial silver town of Guanajuato and the cliffside ruins of Tulum above the Caribbean.
People & Society of Mexico
Mexico has around 130 million residents, making it the tenth most populous country. Fertility fell from about seven births per woman in 1960 to roughly 1.8 today, so the population is still growing but at a slowing rate.
Most Mexicans identify as mestizo, of mixed indigenous and European descent, and around 20 percent report indigenous identity. Roughly 80 percent live in cities, with Greater Mexico City holding over 21 million people. About 11 million Mexican-born people live in the United States, forming one of the largest migrant populations in the world, though net migration between the two countries has been close to balanced since 2010.
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