Gulf Coast and Chiapas Overview

Gorgeous beaches, natural reserves, and pleasant small towns welcome travelers to the states of the southern Gulf Coast, which are united by tropical beauty, indigenous traditions, Caribbean music, and sweeping poverty.

Stretching 300km along the Gulf of Mexico, steamy Veracruz is ripe with breathtaking beaches, burgeoning cities, and vast spaces filled only with roaming cattle and lush vegetation. The ancestral home of the Huastec, Totonac, and Olmec civilizations, Veracruz witnessed Cortés’s first steps on American soil and has since endured foreign intervention and invasion by Spain (1825), France (1839), and the US (1847 and 1914). Today, many residents continue to live off the land, cultivating tobacco and coffee and running small-scale cattle ranches. Veracruz’s main income, however, comes from oil and fishing. Veracruzanos, also known as jarochos, are renowned for their delightful sense of humor, tasty seafood and coffee, and Afro-Caribbean-inspired music. Marimba rhythms and Caribbean colors flow through the steamy port city of Veracruz day and night.

Undertouristed Tabasco lies southeast of Veracruz along the Gulf of Mexico, dotted with lakes and swamps, crisscrossed by rivers, and swathed in dense jungle. Empty beaches line the northern coast, and the southeastern border overflows banana and cacao plantations. Once the center of Olmec territory, Tabasco offers a glimpse into Mexico’s mother culture with the ruins at La Venta. Villahermosa, the capital, rises from the center of the jungle, its colonial identity in constant conflict with modernization.

Chiapas sits south of Tabasco and for centuries has been known for environmental diversity—its cloud-enveloped heights contrast with dense, lowland rainforests. One of Mexico’s most beautiful cities, San Cristóbal de las Casas, renowned for its cobblestone streets and surrounding indígena villages, sits high among these peaks. Chiapas encompasses part of the Mayan heartland, and the Lacandón Rainforest shields the remote ruins of Bonampak and Yaxchilán as well as fiercely traditional groups of Lacandón Maya. Chiapas’s indígenas remain true to their roots—in many communities, schools teach in the local dialect as well as Spanish. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) rebellion of 1994 drew the world’s attention to Chiapas and the highland region’s constant land conflicts, which pit small-scale Mayan farmers against wealthy ranchers and the national government.