Mexico

Mexico: capital Mexico City, population 131.9M, area 1,964,375 km². The 11th most populous country, in Americas. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Mexico runs from desert to rainforest between two oceans, on ground that has been farmed for nine thousand years. Maize was bred here out of a wild grass called teosinte, and went on to feed most of the planet. Teotihuacan, at its height, was the largest city in the Americas — and nobody is certain who built it.

• Maize was domesticated in southern Mexico about nine thousand years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, and was grown alongside beans and squash in one plot.
• Teotihuacan covered twenty-one square kilometres and held perhaps a hundred thousand people, making it the largest city in the Americas between 1 and 500 CE.
• Teotihuacan was not an Aztec city and predates the Aztec Empire by centuries; the Aztecs found the ruins already standing and gave them the name we use.
• Tenochtitlan was farmed on chinampas, rectangles of raised lakebed built to hold moisture, a system the United Nations recognised as agricultural heritage in 2018.

• Frida Kahlo painted portrait after portrait of herself in a folk-art idiom drawn from Mexican popular culture, using them to work through identity, gender and class.
• Octavio Paz took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, after the Cervantes Prize in 1981 and the Neustadt in 1982 — a poet and essayist read well beyond Spanish.
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote poetry and defended a woman's right to study from inside a seventeenth-century convent, and is on the two-hundred-peso note.
• Diego Rivera put Mexican history on public walls at a scale nobody could ignore, making the mural a national art form rather than a decoration.

• At El Castillo in Chichén Itzá, the late sun near the equinoxes throws triangular shadows down the north balustrade so that a serpent seems to descend the stair.
• The Chicxulub crater lies buried under the Yucatán, left by an asteroid about ten kilometres across that struck a little over sixty-six million years ago.
• The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve holds most of the overwintering sites of the eastern monarch population, in pine-oak forest northwest of Mexico City.
• The chinampas of Xochimilco are still worked, the surviving corner of the raised-field farming that once fed the lake cities of the valley.

• On the Day of the Dead, households build an ofrenda laid with the food and drink the dead person liked, and carry the same things to the grave as gifts.
• The days are 1 and 2 November, marked with cempasúchil marigolds and sugar skulls — and the skulls are handed to living friends as often as they are left for the dead.
• UNESCO listed mariachi as intangible cultural heritage in 2011; the ensembles play rancheras, corridos, boleros, sones and huapangos, not one fixed repertoire.
• Cenotes are sinkholes opened where limestone bedrock collapses onto groundwater; the Maya drew drinking water from them, and the word itself comes from Yucatec Maya.

What is the capital of Mexico?

The capital of Mexico is Mexico City.

What is the population of Mexico?

Mexico has about 131.9M people — the 11th most populous country in the world.

How big is Mexico?

Mexico covers 1,964,375 km², making it the 13th largest country by area.

Which region is Mexico in?

Mexico is in North America, Americas.