Mexico

Mexico is a big country in North America.

The United States is to the north. The sea is on both sides. Mexico has tall volcanoes and dry deserts. The capital city is Mexico City.

Mexico is a country in southern North America. The United States lies along its whole northern border, the Pacific Ocean is to the west and south, and the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea are to the east. Guatemala and Belize are its neighbors to the southeast.

Mexico is made of 31 states plus Mexico City, its capital. The land has high plateaus, long mountain ranges, volcanoes, dry deserts in the north and a warm, tropical south. About 132 million people lived there in 2025, and Mexico has more Spanish speakers than any other country.

Mexico is the third-largest country in Latin America, after Brazil and Argentina, covering about 1,964,375 square kilometers. Roughly triangular, it stretches more than 3,000 km from northwest to southeast; its width shrinks to less than 217 km at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and exceeds 1,900 km in the north. Britannica divides it into nine physiographic regions, from the arid Baja California peninsula to the limestone Yucatán Peninsula.

The country's 2020 census counted 126,014,024 residents, and the World Bank estimates 131.9 million for 2025. More than half of the people live in the center of the country, while large parts of the dry north and the tropical south are thinly settled; nearly four-fifths live in urban areas. Mexico has the world's largest population of Spanish speakers, about two and a half times that of Spain or Colombia.

Mexico City is the biggest city in Mexico.

Long ago, it was a city on islands in a lake. Chichén Itzá has a tall stone pyramid with steps. Teotihuacan has two giant pyramids.

Mexico City is the capital, and about 9.2 million people lived there in 2020. It was built by the Spanish in the 1500s on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the old Aztec capital, which had stood on islands in Lake Texcoco. South of the center, at Xochimilco, canals and farming islands still show how the Aztec people built on the lake.

About 50 kilometers away is Teotihuacan, a city built between the 1st and 7th centuries with the huge Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. In the Yucatán, Chichén Itzá was a great Maya city for nearly 1,000 years; its stepped pyramid is called El Castillo.

Tenochtitlan was founded about 1325 on two small islands in the marshes of Lake Texcoco and grew, through artificial islands, to more than 13 km² linked to the shore by causeways; Britannica estimates its 1519 population at about 400,000. It was destroyed by Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés in 1521, and Mexico City was built on its ruins. UNESCO's listing of the historic center and Xochimilco (1987) notes five identified Aztec temple ruins, a cathedral that is the largest on the continent, and Xochimilco's canals and artificial islands, 28 km south.

Teotihuacan, about 50 km northeast of Mexico City, was built between the 1st and 7th centuries AD and laid out on geometric principles; its influence spread across Mesoamerica. Chichén Itzá (inscribed 1988) was one of the greatest Maya centers of the Yucatán over a history of nearly 1,000 years, combining Maya building techniques with elements from central Mexico; El Castillo, the Warriors' Temple and the round observatory El Caracol survive. At Monte Albán, near Oaxaca, Olmecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs lived over some 1,500 years.

Mexico has many volcanoes.

Popocatépetl is a big one near Mexico City. Its top is often white with snow. One volcano grew out of an open field! Mexico also has dry deserts in the north.

Mexico sits on the edge of the North American Plate, where it meets other plates, so it has many earthquakes and volcanoes. It is part of the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean. Its highest peak, the volcano Citlaltépetl (also called Pico de Orizaba), is more than 5,500 meters tall. Popocatépetl, an active volcano southeast of Mexico City, is 5,465 meters high, and its name means "Smoking Mountain" in Nahuatl.

In 1943, the ground in an open field in Michoacán began to erupt. The eruption lasted nine years and built a new volcano, Paricutín. In the northwest, the Baja California peninsula is a long strip of very dry land.

Mexico lies on the western, leading edge of the North American Plate; its interaction with the Pacific, Cocos and Caribbean plates causes frequent severe earthquakes and built much of the rugged south. Its volcanoes, part of the circum-Pacific Ring of Fire, are geologically young, from the Paleogene and Neogene periods. Popocatépetl, a symmetrical, snowcapped cone on the border of the states of México and Puebla, rises to 5,465 m, second only to Pico de Orizaba (Citlaltépetl), which Britannica gives as 5,610 m.

Paricutín, in western Michoacán, formed during a nine-year eruption that began on February 20, 1943, in an open field after weeks of earthquakes and ended in 1952; Britannica calls it one of the youngest volcanoes on Earth. The Baja California peninsula, nearly 1,300 km long and seldom more than 160 km wide, is extremely arid, and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts spread across the north.

The axolotl lives in the water near Mexico City.

It has frilly gills on its head. Every autumn, millions of orange butterflies fly to Mexico's mountain forests. A small porpoise called the vaquita lives in the sea in the northwest.

The axolotl is a salamander that stays like a youngster all its life. It keeps its feathery gills, its tail and its fin, and lives its whole life in water. Wild axolotls now live only in a few spots in the south of Mexico City, and they are critically endangered.

Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies from many parts of North America fly to forests in the mountains about 100 kilometers northwest of Mexico City. They cluster so thickly that tree branches bend under their weight. In the northern Gulf of California lives the vaquita, a small, shy porpoise. Only 7 to 10 were seen in 2025.

The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is neotenic: it keeps larval traits such as external gills, a tail fin and no movable eyelids into adulthood and stays aquatic, even though it develops working lungs. Native to Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco in the Basin of Mexico, it now survives in just three isolated sites in southern Mexico City and is Critically Endangered by pollution, habitat loss and non-native species.

The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, 56,259 hectares of forested mountains about 100 km northwest of Mexico City, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008. Each autumn millions, perhaps a billion, monarchs gather there; in spring they begin a migration to eastern Canada and back over four generations. The vaquita (Phocoena sinus), the most endangered marine mammal, lives only in the northern Gulf of California. NOAA says entanglement in illegal gillnets is driving it toward extinction, and 2025 surveys by the Mexican government and Sea Shepherd reported sightings of between 7 and 10 individuals, including new calves.

About 132 million people live in Mexico.

Most people speak Spanish. Millions of people also speak Indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl and Maya. Corn tortillas are part of many meals.

Most people in Mexico speak Spanish, and Mexico has more Spanish speakers than any other country. More than 7 million people also speak one of 68 Indigenous languages. The most common are Nahuatl, Maya and Tseltal. Most people live in cities, and more than half live in the middle of the country.

Traditional Mexican cooking is built on corn, beans and chili, with tomatoes, squash, avocados, cocoa and vanilla. Corn is cooked with lime, a method called nixtamalization, and made into everyday tortillas and tamales. UNESCO lists this cooking tradition as Intangible Cultural Heritage, a living tradition worth protecting.

The 2020 census counted 126,014,024 people (51.2 percent women), with a median age of 29. Spanish is the official language. That year 7,364,645 people aged three and over, 6.1 percent of the population, spoke an Indigenous language; INEGI counts 68 Indigenous languages, led by Nahuatl (22.4 percent of speakers), Maya (10.5) and Tseltal (8.0), and about 12 in 100 speakers do not speak Spanish. Another 2 percent of people (2,576,213) identified as Afro-Mexican or of African descent.

UNESCO inscribed traditional Mexican cuisine on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010, using Michoacán's community cooks as its example. It rests on corn, beans and chili; farming methods such as the milpa and chinampas (built-up farming islands in lakes); and nixtamalization, cooking maize with lime, which raises its nutritional value. Tortillas and tamales are everyday foods and part of Day of the Dead offerings.