 A geographical snapshot
Mexico is the smallest and most southerly of the three huge countries that make up North America, the other two being Canada and the United states of America. It shares a long northern border (1,933 miles/3,110km) with the U.S.A, and shorter borders with Guatemala and Belize to the south and southeast respectively. Mexico is a Spanish-speaking country with just over 100 million inhabitabts, 22 million of whom live in the vast, sprawling capital, Mexico City.
Within Mexico is a huge variety of landscapes: tropical, palm-fringed coastlines, snowcapped mountains rising to 17,000 ft (5,200 m) and beyond, active volcanoes (the country is situated on a geological fault line and earthquakes are also frequent), desert in the north, jungle in the south and east, and coniferous forests in the central highlands. The flat, low-lying Yucatán peninsula stretches out into the Caribbean to the east, while two long mountain ranges dominate the rest of the country. The Sierra Madre runs the length of Mexico, and continues the line begun by the Rocky Mountains to the north, although split into two ranges. The Sierra Madres Oriental and Occidental, respectively in the east and west if the country, are separated by a fertile central plateau.
When such a mountainous interior is combined with a tropical latitude, rainfall will inevitably follow, and there is an abundance of rivers and large lakes across Mexico. Most major watercourses flow into the sea, though some drain into inland lakes such as Lake Chapala (in Jalisco state), the country’s largest. Mexico’s longest river, the Río Bravo (known as the Rio Grande in the U.S.A), forms the border with Texas to the north.
Mexico also has 7,245 miles (11,592 km) of coastline, not including its coastal islands. The Pacific, or western, coastline is dominated by cliffs and rapidly rising landscapes, while the Gulf coast is mostly flat, with long, sandy beaches.
Climate
Mexico’s climate is inextricably linked its physical geography. Two-thirds of the country lie within the topics, roughly one the same latitude as “the southernmost tip of Hawaii…or very much further east, the town of Juggernaut in India, on the Bay of Bengal,” as Malcolm Lowry put in the opening chapter of his brilliant novel Under the Volcano. On the coast, in the flat expanse of the Yucatán peninsula and along the Gulf of Mexico and most of the Pacific coastline, there is no mistaking the tropical latitude. Only the northwest coast escapes the heat and humidity.
The interior, however, is largely temperate. The high central plateau tempers the latitude with altitude. Whereas in the Yucatán the weather varies from hot and humid with a chance of hurricane (the season is August to December), the seasonal changes in the central plateau are more pronounced, with winter cooler and drier, and summer warmer and wetter.
Desert in the far north of the country and thick jungle in the far south also reflect the fact that rainfall increases dramatically as you move south into the tropical belt.
The states of Mexico
Mexico, a Federal Republic, is divided into thirty-one states and one Federal Districs, incorporating the capital city. The most heavily populated is Mexico state, which contains the spillover population from the Federal District, which itself has the second-largest population, even though it covers by far the smallest area of any state. Generally speaking, the vast and relatively arid northern states are less densely populated than those in the south, and neither of these two regions are as populous as the historical heart of Mexico, the fertile central valleys between the two Sierras.
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