Mazatlán

The seat, the city of Mazatlán, sits at the foot of the Sierra Madre Occidental where it meets the Pacific. The port handles cargo and cruise passengers and is home to a large shrimping fleet.

The Centro Histórico, with its nineteenth-century architecture around Plazuela Machado and the Teatro Ángela Peralta, has been protected by federal decree as a zone of historic monuments since 2001. The city also has a long seafront promenade, the beaches of the Zona Dorada, the lighthouse on Cerro del Crestón and a carnival with nineteenth-century roots.

The town grew out of its port: opened to deep-sea trade around 1820 and, from 1828, the seat of the region’s maritime customs house, Mazatlán became one of the leading commercial centres of the northwest during the nineteenth century. Maritime trade and foreign merchant houses — Germans in particular — shaped what is now the historic centre.

In the twentieth century the port established itself as a fishing and industrial base and, later, as a tourism destination. The Carnaval de Mazatlán, descended from nineteenth-century masquerades, is today one of the oldest and best-attended in Mexico.

The municipality lies in southern Sinaloa, near the Tropic of Cancer, in the transition between the sierra and the coast. Hills and islands rise off the city — Isla de la Piedra, Isla de los Venados — and estuaries and river mouths open along the shore, including those of the Presidio and Quelite rivers.

The climate is warm and sub-humid with a pronounced dry season; Pacific cyclones can reach the coast between summer and autumn.