Guanajuato, the Mexican state named frog hill, holds seven extinct volcanic lanterns
In the southern valleys of Guanajuato, seven dead volcanoes rise abruptly from farmland, their craters up to a kilometre wide. Locals call them holes; a legend of all seven once blazing together gave them the name Seven Lanterns. People once lived in two of them, and one is now a crater lake for swimming.
The state sits in central Mexico, northwest of the capital, at an average altitude of about 2,015 metres, where the dry north gives way to the greener south. Its name comes from a Purépecha phrase meaning frog hill. Spaniards arrived in the 1520s for the silver and other minerals around the city of Guanajuato; Acámbaro was the first town they founded. Mining and farming dominated for centuries until manufacturing, especially car-making, overtook them.
Five natural regions divide the state. The northern Altos mix forested peaks with cactus and pasture, where deer, coyotes, eagles and rattlesnakes survive in the roughest ground. The Sierra Gorda in the northeast is so rugged that villages and wild land have stayed intact; within short distances, rainforest gives way to pine and then desert, and the terrain drops from Pinal de Zamorano at 3,300 metres to a warm canyon at 650 metres where tropical fruit grows. Its Guanajuato portion joined a federal biosphere reserve in 2007.
The best-known region is the Bajío, whose name comes from the Spanish for low. It is a basin of rolling land around the Lerma River that was once thick with oak and mesquite until mines burned the trees for fuel. Today it is among Mexico's most productive farmland and the heart of the state's industry. The Lerma basin drains most of Guanajuato, and a chain of dams tames a river that used to swing between flood and trickle.
History runs along the Bicentennial Route, which follows Miguel Hidalgo's insurgent army at the start of the War of Independence, from Dolores Hidalgo through Atotonilco and San Miguel de Allende to the capital. León, however, is the largest city.
Source: Guanajuato
