Culiacán

Culiacán reaches from the Sierra Madre Occidental in the east to the coastal plain and the Gulf of California in the west. Its seat — officially Culiacán Rosales — is the home of the state government and of the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa.

The municipality is one of Mexico’s largest producers of vegetables, tomatoes above all, thanks to the irrigated farming of the valley. The city is also the state’s main commercial, financial and service centre.

The valley was home to peoples the Spanish chroniclers linked to the name Culhuacán. The town of San Miguel de Culiacán was founded on 29 September 1531 by Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, beside the meeting of the Humaya and Tamazula rivers.

Under Spanish rule it was the seat of the province of Culiacán and a waypoint on the routes of the northwest. It was named state capital in 1830 and, after a spell in which the state powers sat in Mazatlán, has been the capital without interruption since 1873. During the twentieth century the municipality grew with irrigation works — among them the Sanalona dam — and with the spread of commercial export agriculture.

The Río Culiacán forms within the city itself, where the Humaya and the Tamazula join; upstream, the Sanalona dam regulates the Tamazula. The municipal territory drops from the crest of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the farming plain and reaches the Gulf of California along its southern edge.

The prevailing climate is warm and sub-humid in the valley and milder in the sierra, with summer rains.