Things to find in Mexico

What the map holds here

• Cave of the Crystals, Naica Cave
  The largest natural crystals ever found on Earth. Nearly a thousand feet down in the Naica silver-lead mine in Chihuahua, miners cutting a new drift in 2000 broke into a chamber filled with beams of clear selenite (gypsum) up to...
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• Chiapas amber Gem & mineral ground
  The mountains around Simojovel in Chiapas hold the finest amber in the Americas, 25-million-year-old tree resin in honey-gold, red and the rare, prized blue that glows under sunlight, often holding perfect ancient insects. The...
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• El Chupacabra Legend
  The “goat-sucker” is one of the youngest legends here, born in the mid-1990s when livestock across Mexico and Puerto Rico turned up dead and drained of blood, and rumor built a creature to blame: a spined, red-eyed, dog-like...
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• Grutas de Cacahuamilpa Cave
  One of the largest cave systems in the world open to the public, in the mountains of Guerrero. The main tour walks a lit path through a series of vast chambers, some more than 80 metres high, past enormous stalagmite formations...
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• La Isla de las Muñecas Haunted place
  The Island of the Dolls, in the canals of Xochimilco south of Mexico City, is one of the eeriest places in the country. A hermit named Don Julian Santana, who lived here alone, believed a girl had drowned in the canal and, to...
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• La Llorona, the Weeping Woman Legend
  The most famous legend in Mexico and much of Latin America. La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who drowned her own children in a river in a fit of grief or jealousy and now wanders the waterways at night, weeping and crying...
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• Las Momias de Guanajuato Haunted place
  A museum of the naturally mummified dead, in the silver city of Guanajuato. The dry, mineral-rich soil and the crypt conditions mummified bodies buried in the city cemetery in the 1800s and 1900s, and when families could not pay...
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• Mexican fire opal Gem & mineral ground
  Mexico’s national gem is the fire opal, a translucent stone in blazing orange, red and yellow, born in the gas cavities of the rhyolite lavas of the central highlands. The classic ground is around Magdalena in Jalisco and...
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• Ojuela / Mapimí minerals Gem & mineral ground
  The old silver-lead mine at Ojuela, reached by crossing a spectacular 1890s suspension footbridge over a canyon near Mapimí in Durango, is one of the most celebrated mineral localities on Earth. It produced the world’s finest...
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• Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl Legend
  The two great volcanoes over the Valley of Mexico are, the legend says, a pair of lovers. Iztaccíhuatl, the “sleeping woman,” whose snowy ridgeline really does look like a woman lying down, was a princess who died of grief on...
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• Sistema Sac Actun (the cenotes) Cave
  Under the jungle of the Riviera Maya lies the longest surveyed underwater cave system on Earth, hundreds of kilometres of flooded limestone passages linking the cenotes, the sinkholes that were the ancient Maya’s only fresh water...
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• Taxco silver Gem & mineral ground
  The white hill town of Taxco has lived on silver for five centuries, and in the 1930s the American William Spratling turned it into the silversmithing capital of the world, where whole streets are silver workshops. The mines that...
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• The Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá Legend
  At the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá is a huge natural sinkhole, the Sacred Cenote, that was a doorway to the underworld and the rain god Chaac. For centuries the Maya threw offerings into its green water, gold, jade, copal,...
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Every one of these is sourced

Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.