Ahome

Los Mochis grew in the early twentieth century around the sugar mill founded by the American industrialist Benjamin F. Johnston, laid out on a grid plan. Topolobampo, on Ohuira bay, is a deep-water port and the western end of the Chihuahua–Pacific Railway line.

Irrigated farming in the Río Fuerte district — sugarcane, maize and vegetables — and a large fishing and aquaculture sector sustain the municipal economy. The older town of Ahome gives the municipality its name.

The area was home to Mayo (Yoreme) peoples; the Jesuit mission of Ahome was established in the early seventeenth century. American colonists arrived in the late nineteenth century: Albert K. Owen promoted a utopian-socialist colony at Topolobampo tied to a railway project toward the Pacific.

Drawn by that project, Benjamin F. Johnston developed sugarcane cultivation and, around 1903, the planned city of Los Mochis beside his mill. Through the twentieth century the municipality grew with the irrigation of the valley and the consolidation of the port.

Ahome is an alluvial plain of the lower Río Fuerte, regulated upstream by the Miguel Hidalgo and Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez (Huites) dams. On the coast the bays of Ohuira and Topolobampo open out, with mangroves and the island of El Maviri.

The climate is very hot and dry, with sparse rainfall concentrated in summer.