Take a visual tour of the week in Mexico – from migrants in Tapachula to the aftermath of Hurricane Otis in Acapulco to Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City – with our selection of pictures from around the country.
It feels like winter is here in Mexico, with temperatures plunging below freezing across the north of the country and the arrival of heavy rains in the south.
The National Water Commission (Conagua) predicted that by dawn on Saturday, temperatures could drop to -10 degrees Celsius in the mountains of Baja California, Chihuahua and Durango, and to -5 in Sonora, Coahuila, México State, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Hidalgo and Veracruz.
Temperatures between 0 and 5 degrees Celsius were forecast across the rest of the center and north of the country, including in the capital, Mexico City.
Meanwhile, there is a probable cyclonic development in the southwest Caribbean, leading to very heavy rains in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche and Yucatán. Intense rains are forecast in Quintana Roo, with potential risks of landslides and flooding.
Southern Mexico is forecast to see wind gusts of up to 60 kilometers per hour, while gusts of up to 100 kilometers per hour could hit the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca and Veracruz.
Tropical Storm Pilar – currently 700 kilometers south of the Guerrero coast – is expected to move westwards over the Pacific, and will no longer affect Mexico.
Conagua said the freezing conditions were caused by cold front number 8 – a mass of cold air that moved down from Canada and the United States at the end of October.
Mexico has seen three such cold fronts in September and a further five in October. Five more are forecast for November and eight for December. In 2024, Mexico is predicted to see ten cold fronts in January, nine in February, seven in March, six in April and three in May – making a total of 56 across the winter season –a similar figure to last winter, which saw 55 cold fronts. This year, however, the “El Niño” weather phenomenon is expected to cause more intense rainfall.
With reports from El Financiero
After Hurricane Otis wrought devastation in Acapulco, damage to roads and infrastructure has slowed the arrival of aid. That’s why a number of individuals and businesses have taken it upon themselves to help get basic supplies to the disaster zone. One such business is Taquería Don Rey in Mexico City, which delivered more than 2,500 tacos to affected Acapulqueños.
Staff from the Taquería Don Rey in the Cuauhtémoc borough prepared and transported 120 kilograms of meat — enough to feed around 1,000 people. A team of chefs began to prepare the food on Tuesday, before delivering it two days later.
Imagen Noticias interviews residents at Taquería Don Rey’s makeshift taco stand in Acapulco.
The port city of Acapulco is suffering from a lack of basic necessities more than a week after the hurricane, which has caused billions of dollars of damage to the region.
Thanks to the tireless work of the staff of Don Rey, residents were treated not only to tacos and handmade tortillas but also to pineapple, guacamole, salsa and a full array of traditional condiments.
The taquería posted a message on their social media, explaining that they decided to help “our brothers in Acapulco, since they do not have food available in the region.” The restaurant also asked followers to make a contribution in order to deliver more food to those who need it most.
This is not the first time that Don Rey has given away tacos to charity. The restaurant has previously operated a taco stand outside Mexico City’s General Hospital, providing free food to families of hospitalized patients.
With reports by Aristegui Noticias and Infobae
The Mexican peso extended its winning streak to seven days in Friday morning trading, appreciating to 17.28 to the US dollar before weakening slightly.
Bloomberg data shows that the peso closed at 18.32 to the dollar on Oct. 25 before strengthening every weekday since then.
Shortly after 1 p.m. on Friday, the USD:MXN exchange rate was 17.44.
The peso’s appreciation to 17.28 represented a gain of 1.3% compared to its closing position on Thursday and an advance of 4.8% this week. The cumulative appreciation from the seven-day winning streak was about 6%.
The peso’s strengthening on Friday morning came after data out of the United States showed that job growth slowed more than expected in October. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that U.S. employers added 150,000 jobs last month, 30,000 fewer than the number expected by economists. The figure for September was 297,000.
The latest data increases the likelihood that the U.S. Federal Reserve will leave interest rates unchanged after its December monetary policy meeting.
The peso has benefited this year from the broad gap between the Bank of Mexico’s benchmark interest rate – currently 11.25% – and the Fed’s federal funds rate, which is set at a range of 5.25%-5.5%.
The peso made gains earlier this week due to a reduced aversion to risk and after the Fed announced on Wednesday that it was holding its funds rate steady. The peso has appreciated by around 12% this year after starting 2023 at about 19.5 to the dollar.
At his Friday morning press conference, President López Obrador described the currency as a “super peso” and “very strong.”
“This helps us. There are some disadvantages but there are more advantages,” he said.
“… The [state of the] economy has a lot to do with confidence so when a country has good macroeconomic numbers it’s a country with advantages because it attracts investment,” López Obrador said.
“It helps a lot if there is no devaluation, inflation is under control, there is no over-indebtedness and there is [economic] growth,” he said.
“And Mexico now has a very good reputation for public investment and a lot of foreign investment is coming in,” López Obrador added.
With reports from Reuters
Jalisco’s Primavera Forest is huge, covering 30,500 hectares. It starts precisely where the city of Guadalajara ends and stretches west for about 23 kilometers, and measures 18 kilometers from top to bottom.
Although it is called a bosque (forest), it is much more than that. Its pine-and-oak-covered hills mark the exact location of the Primavera Caldera, a volcano that erupted dramatically 94,000 years ago, shooting 40 cubic kilometers of ash and pumice (called jal in Mexican Spanish) straight up into the air in a Yellowstone-type explosion which affected the whole planet. The word Jalisco refers to the area where this jal fell back to Earth.
Recently, forest managers have created an interpretive trail where visitors can experience the caldera’s unique giant pumice horizon, consisting of blocks of pumice up to eight meters in diameter, a phenomenon that has attracted geologists from all around the world to Bosque la Primavera.
The magma that caused the great explosion all those millenia ago still lurks beneath the woods and manifests itself in boiling-hot rivers and hissing fumaroles.
The Federal Electric Commission decided to tap that subterranean hot water many years ago and sank 13 steam wells in the forest – some of them nearly two kilometers deep – and in the process, they disfigured the forest to such an extent that angry environmentalists were able to curtail the entire project.
The Primavera Forest is home to 742 species of flora, 200 birds, and 59 mammals, including curious creatures like coatís and ringtails, not to mention a few pumas.
In 1980, the forest was declared a protected area and wildlife reserve by President López Portillo, and in 2006, it was named a biosphere reserve by UNESCO.
While these designations may look like a triumph for nature conservation, Bosque la Primavera has serious problems. When the government declared the forest a protected area, it neglected to purchase the land. The people living there were simply handed a long list of things they would no longer be allowed to do, including ranching and farming activities that could bring them income. To this day 80% of the Primavera is owned either by private individuals or ejidos (cooperatives).
Despite these circumstances, this forest is mostly composed of vast stretches of wilderness where you can walk for days without seeing another human being.
At one moment, you may find yourself strolling through an endless field of aromatic wild sage just as tall as you are. Then you step into a clearing filled with wildflowers: trumpet-like morning glories, pine pink orchids, fragrant and edible flores de San Juan, and gorgeous dahlias (the Mexican national flower).
Lush vegetation, spectacular slot canyons, hot springs, scenic peaks: the Primavera Biosphere Reserve is the perfect place to introduce city folks to nature, and its managers decided to dedicate October 27, Primavera Forest Day, to a colloquium on “The Forest as Teacher.”
This is an excellent turn of speech, as it contrasts with the traditional approach to teaching in schools via books, lectures, and memorization.
The concept of using the forest itself as a teacher was pioneered in Jalisco by local naturalist Jesús “Chuy” Moreno who, over more than three decades, would take as many as 100 children into the woods all day long, day after day, for two weeks each summer.
“They would typically start out fickle,” Moreno told me. “’Yuk, this tall grass tickles my feet,’ they would say… but two hours later they would be having the time of their lives playing in it.”
Then it would begin to rain and the kids would look at Moreno, who would shrug his shoulders: “It’s just water,” he would say, without batting an eye.
Immersed in the woods all day long, the group would come upon birds, flowers, beetles, agaves, snakes, and perhaps a strange arachnid called a vinegaroon or whip scorpion, a creature with pincers and a long needle-like tail. In these cases, out would come reference books and the children would set to work identifying the species they discovered and learn all about them. As a result of spending two weeks exploring the woods, many of these children ended up deciding to become biologists and botanists themselves.
Inspired by Moreno’s courses in the woods, I began to organize family-style hikes in the Primavera Forest. To ensure that even five-year-olds would consider the experience “fun,” I limited the length of the hikes to two or three kilometers and turned all of them into loop hikes, incorporating both slot canyons and deep forest in every route. With the help of botanists, biologists, and geologists, I learned things that I could pass on to each group of hikers.
At the colloquium celebrating Primavera Biosphere Reserve Day, participants suggested that short, family-style hikes like these could be organized every week, with biology and botany students acting as guides to take adults and children away from their smartphones for a while and give them a positive introduction to nature.
Guadalajara is now praised for its Via RecreActiva, which gets hundreds of people on their feet on weekends and I hope that it will someday also be famed as “the city that loves the biosphere.”
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, since 1985. His most recent book is Outdoors in Western Mexico, Volume Three. More of his writing can be found on his blog.
In the wake of Acapulco’s devastating effects of Hurricane Otis, we want to reminisce on what made this bay such a special place. While some of you may recall the golden age of Acapulco as Mexico’s most famous Pacific coast beach resort in the 1960s and 1970s, you may not be aware that during those years, a new sport was being born in the backyard of a millionaire’s beach house, right here in Acapulco.
It was the 1960s, and Mexican businessman Enrique Corcuera wanted a fronton court in his Acapulco house. He didn’t have the space for it, so he built a smaller, 20 by 30 meter court and placed side walls to prevent the balls from crossing into the neighboring field. The game became popular amongst his friends and family, and in no time European royalty took padel overseas.
Today, a sport that began as an elite pastime during the golden age of Acapulco has become a global sensation growing more popular by the minute.
Corcuera was an avid fan of fronton and tennis, but he only had a 20 meter long, 10 meter wide piece of land at his home in Las Brisas, Acapulco, to build a court on. “I thought I could use that piece of land to play a ball game and build a small fronton court or something similar,” he said in an interview with Padel Life magazine.
In that area, he built a court with a net in the center. The game rules were simple: players would follow tennis rules and use the walls to bounce the ball. To play the game, they would use wood rackets that Corcuera had kept from paddle tennis and tennis balls. “We tried with different balls, and we noticed that the right ones were the tennis balls,” he said.
“It turned out to be a fun, easy and enjoyable game, and one that my friends played with pleasure,” he said. Corcuera’s new sport began to grow in popularity among Mexico’s elite and became known as “padel Corcuera.” As the game became more popular, people began referring to it as simply “padel.”
Padel was introduced to Spain in 1970 by Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburge, who had played the game during the summer holiday at Corcuera’s Acapulco home.
Alfonso, who founded the Marbella Club Hotel in 1954 as a meeting place for the elite, built the first padel courts outside of Mexico in 1974, introducing the sport to Europe. However, he made some alterations to Corcuera’s original idea to make the game more competitive: one of these ideas included wire fences on the sides of the court instead of walls.
During the 1980s and ‘90s, the courts hosted the famous Pro-Am padel tournament, which was sponsored by the Bilbao-based menswear store Smith & Smith. The owner of these shops was Julio Alegría Artiach, considered one of the most prominent figures in the history of padel due to his vision, promotion, investment, and lifelong dedication to the institutional management of the game.
When Spanish King Juan Carlos I and former Wimbledon champion Manolo Santana began to play the game, its popularity quickly increased.
From Spain, the sport traveled back to the Americas thanks to Julio Menditeguy, an Argentine millionaire and regular guest at the Marbella Club. Today, padel is so popular in Argentina that many think the sport was invented there, with over 2 million players and more than 10,000 padel courts in the country.
The International Padel Federation was founded in 1991, with the first Padel World Championship taking place the following year with the participation of teams from 11 countries. The tournament went on for over a decade until the World Padel Tour was born in 2012. It is now the largest professional padel championship in the world.
In 1992, the Mexican Padel Federation was created. Its founding members included Enrique’s wife Viviana Corcuera, their son Luis Corcuera and lawyer Ignacio Soto Borja y Anda, one of the sport’s greatest promoters.
Padel is frequently played on cement surfaces, but there are also courts with synthetic grass floors and supreme courts.
A padel court is 20 meters long by 10 meters wide, with 3-meter-tall walls. A mesh or metal fabric borders the rest of the perimeter. The net and ball are similar to those used in tennis.
Padel rackets are 45 centimeters long and weigh an average of 450 grams. They have padded grips and are made of wood, rubber and graphite, among other materials. Racket faces are covered in holes for aerodynamics.
Inspired by the rules of tennis, padel is played only in pairs and in sets of three. To serve, the player must hit the ball below the waist and diagonally.
International sports federations seeking to add their sport to the Olympics must prove that their sport meets the following criteria set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC):
While padel meets three of the criteria listed above, it does not yet meet the fourth requirement.
However, the IOC has granted padel a membership status in the Association of IOC Recognised International Sports Federations. This marks an important milestone, as it represents the beginning of the IOC’s determination of whether padel meets the necessary criteria for inclusion as an Olympic sport.
New sports are selected for the Olympics seven years in advance of each edition of the games. The next opportunity for padel players to participate would be in 2032, assuming the sport meets IOC criteria by 2025.
In 2022, the Mexican Senate granted posthumous recognition to Enrique Corcuera, who passed away in 1999, as well as to Viviana Corcuera and Ignacio Soto Borja y Anda for the creation and dissemination of padel as a sport that began in Mexico. “With this recognition, we tell the world that Mexico is a place of creativity and talent,” said Senate majority leader Ricardo Monreal Ávila.
Acapulco’s fun vibe and high-profile visitors helped Corcuera’s vision for an easy and enjoyable game transcend his backyard into the world. Today, millions worldwide enjoy playing this game just as Corcuera and his friends did in Acapulco’s golden age.
By Mexico News Daily writer Gabriela Solís
A second Mexican woman has left the Gaza Strip along with her husband, Foreign Affairs Minister Alicia Bárcena said Friday.
Bárbara Lango, an anesthesiologist from Sinaloa who had stayed on in Gaza after completing an assignment for Doctors Without Borders, departed the enclave with her husband Suleiman, Bárcena said on X, the social media site formerly called Twitter.
Above a photo of the couple holding up a Mexican flag at the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, the foreign minister thanked the Mexican Embassy in Egypt and everyone else who made their departure possible.
Thousands of people have been killed in Gaza in recent weeks after Israel began firing rockets into the enclave in response to an Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Some foreign nationals are now able to leave Gaza, after the Rafah crossing to Egypt opened on Wednesday thanks to an agreement between Egypt, Gaza and Israel mediated by Qatar. Certain people including hundreds of foreign passport-holders were permitted to exit the under siege coastal territory.
Lango’s departure came after Michelle Ravel, also a doctor, left Gaza on Wednesday.
Bárcena said Thursday that Ravel was at the Mexican Embassy in Cairo “in preparation for her repatriation” to Mexico.
The foreign minister last month was critical of Israel for not allowing foreigners to leave Gaza.
“It’s urgent to make an appeal to Israel [to allow foreigners to leave Gaza] because even war has rules,” she said on X on Oct. 14.
While Lango and Ravel have now left, two other Mexicans who were taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 are believed to still be in Gaza.
Ilana Gritzewsky and Orión Hernández Radoux are believed to among more than 200 hostages held captive by Hamas.
Mexico began evacuating its citizens from Israel soon after the war with Hamas broke out. Over 700 Mexicans left the country on flights operated by the Mexican Air Force.
With reports from Aristegui Noticias
E-commerce giant Amazon has begun investing in Mexico’s emerging Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT) project, according to a report in La Jornada newspaper that quoted Foreign Affairs Minister Alicia Bárcena.
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec — which the CIIT project aims to develop into an industrial powerhouse — spans roughly 140 miles across Mexico’s narrowest point between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Coast.
The project includes the construction of 10 industrial parks and a railway between the port cities of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz that officials promise will quickly carry cargo from one ocean to another and rival the Panama Canal.
There will also be a passenger train plying the same route, and the ports of Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz are both being modernized.
Participating on Wednesday in a Washington, D.C. panel with U.S. Congress members and businesspeople, Bárcena said that Amazon — which had already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Mexican government — is now investing in the region in accordance with its model of connecting small- and medium-sized companies with international trade.
Bárcena is participating in the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) Summit and in her comments she focused on the value of public-private alliances in intraregional trade. It’s “a pragmatic approach, leaving ideology behind, in order to achieve integration through investments,” she said.
In June, officials announced that the project had secured 52 letters of intent to invest in this less-developed southern region, from both Mexican and foreign companies, representing US $4.5 billion.
The commitments from private companies — reportedly 3M, DHL and Amazon — ranged from US $10 million to US $500 million, according to Carlos Sedano Rodríguez, head of the CIIT’s Investment Promotion and Commercial Development Unit. Ten were from developers and 42 were from companies wanting to establish factories and other operations in the area.
These businesses will be located in the 10 industrial parks being built adjacent to the railway. The centers are being built, in part, to give companies the opportunity to take advantage of nearshoring — as Asian companies seek to move manufacturing to Mexico, thanks to its proximity to the United States to reduce manufacturing and transportation costs and bolster supply chains.
The industrial parks in Oaxaca and Veracruz are being installed in areas referred to as Development Hubs for Well-Being, and each will be about 300 hectares (740 acres). Companies that invest in the hubs will be eligible for various tax benefits.
Mexican Economy Minister Raquel Buenrostro said the CIIT project could represent as much as 5% of Mexico’s GDP once operational.
With reports from La Jornada and E-Veracruz
Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Alicia Bárcena has called for U.S. support to “modernize” the border between the two countries, to encourage international investment and promote cross-border trade.
Speaking at the Responsible Investment Forum organized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington on Thursday, Bárcena said that Mexico has an opportunity to become “the country of relocation and nearshoring,” but “we do not want to do this alone.”
“We really want to control drug trafficking and arms smugglers, but at the same time we want to provide better infrastructure for trade, and therefore we have to modernize the border,” she said.
Bárcena also said that international investment and the support of institutions such as the IDB would be an essential part of this process, as that “is how the security of the border is guaranteed.”
Mexico is now the top trading partner of the United States, with the exchange of goods between the two countries reaching nearly US $400 billion in the first six months of this year. Much of this can be attributed to nearshoring, as companies relocate operations from Asia to Mexico to take advantage of access to the U.S. market.
“We are working on a strategy to make sure that North America can generate, for example, the production of semiconductors and conductors and attract companies that are doing it in Asia to bring them to North America,” Bárcena said.
Concerns over security and migration have been a significant obstacle to the movement of goods between the two countries. In September and October, border crossings between Mexico and Texas were snarled for several weeks, after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered more stringent inspections of cargo entering the United States, suspending cargo processing entirely at some crossings. Mexico’s National Chamber of Trucking estimated this held up more than US $1.5 billion of exports.
A similar episode occurred in April 2022, which only eased after Nuevo Laredo Governor Samuel García agreed to install new checkpoints on the Mexican side of Nuevo León’s border with Texas.
Months later, Mexico agreed to invest US $1.5 billion in border infrastructure between 2022 and 2024. In September this year, a new state-of-the-art checkpoint was installed at the Puerto Colombia border crossing in Nuevo León, which Governor García boasted would be “the safest and fastest customs office in North America.”
However, this is only one of the 53 border crossings between Mexico and the U.S. At Thursday’s IDB forum, Bárcena stressed that a successful strategy would need to “incorporate the rest of the region.”
With reports from Forbes and El Universal
One of the greatest perks of living in CDMX is its connectivity to almost everywhere. It is home to the busiest international airport in Latin America and the hub of at least 10 bus lines that carry passengers all over Mexico. It has easy access to the mountains, the jungle and the coast, depending on your mood. And with temperatures rapidly dropping in the nation’s capital, you might be on the lookout for sun. If you don’t have enough time to go to the beach but want a relaxing weekend of warm weather, here’s why Cuernavaca is the ideal destination.
The “City of Eternal Spring” has long been coveted for its pleasant weather. Its pre-Hispanic inhabitants, the Tlahuica people, were a flourishing agricultural society developed around the area’s fertile lands. When Hernan Cortés arrived in the 16th century, he understood Cuernavaca, then known as Cuauhnahuac, to be an ideal location for a colonial outpost. He ordered the construction of an imposing palace and a sprawling hacienda, where he would later attempt to retire. Spanish nobles soon followed suit, and Cuernavaca’s landscape was rather quickly peppered with villas and colorful gardens, many of which remain intact. With the arrival of both the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution, Cuernavaca turned into a political and artistic haven for creativity and anti-establishment ideas to thrive.
Today, Cuernavaca’s metro area exceeds 1 million inhabitants with a significant swell on the weekends when Chilangos come to visit from Mexico City. Despite its varied history, colonial architecture, and indigenous culture, I didn’t find much to do. This is exactly why I think it’s the perfect weekend getaway for anyone who wants just a little bit of sightseeing and a lot of time by the pool.
Hotel & Spa Hacienda de Cortés
Built in 1531 for Hernan Cortés, there’s no reason not to stay here. The property is gorgeous, peaceful, probably full of ghosts. The rooms could use some updating but nonetheless, I’d advise you to splurge on a suite with a little patio. There’s a spa, a pool and lovely gardens. The onsite restaurant, La Casona, is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen.
La Tía de las Muchachas for fast and fresh. It’s casual, with a traditional menu that leans toward healthy.
Don Fer for cozy, easy, highly-rated dishes.
La India Bonita for the garden and the history.
Iguanas Greens for an authentic menu and local experience.
Casa Hidalgo for its prime location in front of the Cortés Palace and vibey outdoor seating.
Like I said, Cuernavaca is not overloaded with things to do, and that’s the best part about it. Its small historic center can be exhausted in less than a day if you put your mind to it. This leaves ample time to enjoy my first and most important suggestion: Lay by the pool, soak in the sun and read a book.
When you need a break from all that relaxing, check out the following:
Jardín Borda: It was closed when I visited but sounds like a must-see.
Museo Robert Brady: This eclectic museum was once the abode of American artist and art collector Robert Brady. Guaranteed to spark new decor ideas for your own home.
Palacio de Cortés: One of the oldest colonial constructions still standing. There is a museum inside.
MMAPO: A collection of brightly-colored regional pop art.
Cathedral of Cuernavaca: A complex of 3 churches with a small, very random sheep farm.
The University Museum of Indigenous Art: A tiny historical museum that’s well worth the 15 peso entry.
La Casona Spencer: Art exhibition aside, the house and its gorgeous view of the Cathedral complex is a real draw.
Mercado de Artesanías: In case you are in desperate need of Cuernavaca shot glasses.
Bethany Platanella is a travel planner and lifestyle writer based in Mexico City. She lives for the dopamine hit that comes directly after booking a plane ticket, exploring local markets, practicing yoga and munching on fresh tortillas. Sign up to receive her Sunday Love Letters to your inbox, peruse her blog, or follow her on Instagram.
