The Most Beautiful Places in Mexico
56 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Mexico are Palenque, Lake Bacalar and Copper Canyon. The list covers 56 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Mexico's landscapes were made by fire and water. A belt of volcanoes crosses the centre of the country, while the Yucatán peninsula is a flat slab of limestone dissolved from below into caves, underground rivers and cenotes. On this ground several great civilisations rose, from Teotihuacan and the Zapotecs to the Maya and the Aztecs, and after them Spanish builders raised cathedrals and hospices on the ruins of their temples.
Teotihuacan near Mexico City lays its Pyramids of the Sun and Moon along the Avenue of the Dead. The Great Pyramid of Cholula is the largest pyramid in the world by volume, though from a distance it looks like a hill crowned by a colonial church. Monte Albán, the Zapotec capital, sits on a levelled mountaintop above the Oaxaca valley. In the Maya south, Palenque's temples emerge from the Chiapas rainforest, Calakmul's pyramids rise above the forest canopy of Campeche, and at Chichén Itzá the Temple of Kukulcan casts a serpent of light down its stairs at the equinoxes.
The colonial city adds another layer: the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City, built over nearly three centuries beside the old Aztec sacred precinct, and the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, whose chapel is covered in murals by José Clemente Orozco. Nature supplies the rest. Popocatépetl, one of the country's most active volcanoes, smokes above the central highlands; the Sumidero Canyon's walls rise roughly a kilometre above the river; Agua Azul spills in turquoise cascades; and deep in the Naica mine, the Cave of the Crystals holds gypsum beams many metres long.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Palenque | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Lake Bacalar | Lagoon | |
| 3 | Copper Canyon | Canyon | |
| 4 | Las Pozas | Sculpture garden | |
| 5 | Ik Kil | Cenote | |
| 6 | Hierve el Agua | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Tulum Archaeological Site | Archaeological site | |
| 8 | Santa María Tonantzintla | Church building | |
| 9 | Teotihuacan | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 10 | Agua Azul Waterfalls | Waterfall | |
| 11 | Popocatépetl | Volcano | |
| 12 | Cave of the Crystals | Cave | |
| 13 | Monte Albán | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 14 | Great Pyramid of Cholula | Archaeological site | |
| 15 | Iztaccihuatl | Volcano | |
| 16 | Chichen Itza | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 17 | Calakmul | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 18 | Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 19 | Hospicio Cabañas | Museum | |
| 20 | Temple of Kukulcan | Temple | ✓ |
| 21 | Sumidero Canyon | Canyon | |
| 22 | Aztec Sun Stone | Sculpture | |
| 23 | Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City | Opera house | |
| 24 | Mitla | Archaeological site | |
| 25 | Pyramid of the Magician | Temple | |
| 26 | Árbol del Tule | Remarkable tree | |
| 27 | Sacred Cenote | Doline | ✓ |
| 28 | Parícutin | Volcano | |
| 29 | Peña de Bernal | Rock formation | |
| 30 | Yaxchilan | Archaeological site |
01 Palenque
Mexico17.484° N 92.046° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Palenque is the Maya city that most makes you feel the forest pressing in. Its temples of pale limestone sit on a shelf at the foot of the Chiapas hills, with dense green canopy climbing behind them and streams running through the site.
Did you know? The vaulted Otulum aqueduct runs for more than 100 metres underground beneath the main plaza.
02 Lake Bacalar
Laguna de Bacalar
Mexico · 27.7 km from Chetumal18.750° N 88.315° W
Image by AngieToh from Pixabay Lake Bacalar, on the southern edge of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula near the border with Belize, is a long, narrow ribbon of fresh water, more than 50 km from north to south and barely two kilometres across at its widest.
Did you know? From Bacalar the Spanish governed the whole southern half of present-day Quintana Roo, answering to the captain general in Mérida.
03 Copper Canyon
Barrancas del Cobre
Mexico27.516° N 107.766° W
Jesus Alejandro Guer… · CC BY 3.0 The Copper Canyon — Barrancas del Cobre — is not one gorge but a whole system of them, carved by several rivers into the Sierra Madre Occidental in southwestern Chihuahua before they gather into the Río Fuerte and run to the Gulf of California.
Did you know? The Chihuahua–Pacific railway runs for about 650 km and crosses 39 bridges; work began in the late 19th century but was delayed by the Mexican Revolution.
04 Las Pozas
Mexico · 26.5 km from Tamazunchale ♤21.397° N 98.997° W
MyName (Bernardo Bolaños) · CC BY 2.5 Deep in the rainforest of the Sierra Gorda, above the village of Xilitla in San Luis Potosí, concrete columns rise out of the jungle like the flowers of some impossible plant. Stairways climb into nothing and structures open onto the sky, while waterfalls pour into a chain of natural pools below.
Did you know? James once brought his pet boa constrictors with him to the Hotel Francis in Mexico City.
05 Ik Kil
Mexico · 35.9 km from Valladolid20.666° N 88.545° W
Image by mattiaverga from Pixabay Ik Kil doesn't look like a cave that happened to fill with water — it looks like the ground simply gave way, which is essentially what happened.
Did you know? Besides human remains, centuries-old animal bones have been recovered from the water, pointing to a wider range of offerings.
06 Hierve el Agua
Mexico · 14.4 km from Mitla16.866° N 96.276° W
Image by Javs_CDMX from Pixabay High in the dry hills east of the Oaxaca valley, two pale cliffs appear to be frozen in the act of pouring.
Did you know? Traces of other minerals such as iron, barium and silver in the water give individual stone 'stalactites' their own tints within the white mass.
07 Tulum Archaeological Site
Tulum
Mexico20.215° N 87.429° W
Image by GreenCardShow from Pixabay Tulum is the Maya city that chose the edge of the sea. Its temples stand on limestone cliffs about 12 metres above a strip of white sand and the turquoise Caribbean, and no other major Maya site offers that combination of grey stone, palm trees and open water.
Did you know? The Temple of the Frescoes is thought to have served as an observatory for following the movements of the sun.
08 Santa María Tonantzintla
Mexico · 12.2 km from Puebla City19.030° N 98.320° W
Another Believer · CC BY-SA 4.0 From outside, the church of Santa María Tonantzintla looks modest: a façade of red brick and glazed Talavera tiles, typical of the Puebla region. Inside, the nave, vaults and dome erupt into one of the most extraordinary interiors in Mexico.
Did you know? For the Assumption feast on 15 August, villagers lay a carpet of coloured sand inside the church depicting praises to the Virgin.
09 Teotihuacan
Mexico · 30.8 km from Zumpango19.692° N 98.844° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordiMA1587 from Pixabay Long before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan was already a ruin they could only guess about. The Nahuatl name they gave it is usually translated as the place where the gods were born, and in their cosmology it was here that the present sun had been created.
Did you know? Its chambers held hundreds of metallic-looking spheres, 4 to 13 centimetres across, with clay cores coated in a yellow mineral called jarosite.
10 Agua Azul Waterfalls
Cascadas de Agua Azul
Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W
Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them.
Did you know? The area sits in one of Mexico's rainiest zones, where humid winds off the Gulf of Mexico are trapped by the mountain slopes.
11 Popocatépetl
Mexico · 22.8 km from Atlixco19.023° N 98.623° W
Image by jcesar2015 from Pixabay Popocatépetl, "the smoking mountain" in Nahuatl, is the volcano that stands guard over the Valley of Mexico. At about 5,400 m it is the second-highest peak in the country after the Pico de Orizaba, and it lies some 70 km southeast of Mexico City, which on clear days can see its cone on the horizon.
Did you know? DNA studies suggest a huge eruption in the first century AD may have driven migrations that helped populate the great city of Teotihuacan.
12 Cave of the Crystals
Cueva de los cristales
Mexico · 38.7 km from Delicias27.851° N 105.496° W
Alexander Van Driessche · CC BY 3.0 Some 300 metres below the mining town of Naica in Chihuahua, miners cutting a new tunnel for the silver, zinc and lead workings of Industrias Peñoles broke into a chamber in April 2000 that turned out to hold some of the largest natural crystals ever recorded. 4 metres and is estimated to weigh around 12 tonnes.
Did you know? The same tunnelling work in 2000 also opened two other crystal-filled cavities, named the Queen's Eye and the Candles caves.
13 Monte Albán
Mexico · 11.3 km from Oaxaca de Juárez17.044° N 96.768° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
ENDS2306 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Monte Albán sits on an artificially levelled ridge about 400 metres above the floor of the Valley of Oaxaca, at the point where the valley's three arms meet. From its Main Plaza, some 300 by 150 metres, the view takes in all of them, and Oaxaca City lies about 9 km to the east.
Did you know? A neighbourhood of ethnic Zapotecs has been identified in Teotihuacan, the great city of central Mexico.
14 Great Pyramid of Cholula
Gran Pirámide de Cholula
Mexico · 10.7 km from Puebla City19.058° N 98.302° W
Hajor~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 At first sight the Great Pyramid of Cholula looks like a natural hill with a colonial church on its summit. 5 million for the Great Pyramid of Giza. It rises only about 25 metres above the plain, but its final base measures some 300 by 315 metres. Its Nahuatl name, Tlachihualtepetl, means "constructed mountain".
Did you know? The painted figures on the Pyramid of the Painted Skulls were first taken for grasshopper heads before being recognised as stylised human skulls.
15 Iztaccihuatl
Iztaccíhuatl
Mexico · 36.8 km from Atlixco19.178° N 98.642° W
Image by Fernando50 from Pixabay Iztaccíhuatl is the long, snow-streaked mountain that lies along the eastern skyline of the Valley of Mexico, and seen from the west or east its summit ridge reads unmistakably as a woman lying on her back: there is a head, a chest, knees and feet, all under snow.
Did you know? Legend tells of a princess who died of grief and was turned into the mountain beside her warrior, Popocatépetl.
16 Chichen Itza
Chichén Itzá
Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.683° N 88.569° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Kirt Edblom from Albany, Oregon, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 El Castillo isn't one building — it's two, one inside the other.
Did you know? The name Chichén Itzá translates roughly as 'at the mouth of the well of the Itzá', a nod to the natural sinkholes that supplied water to a plain without rivers.
17 Calakmul
Mexico18.105° N 89.811° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jorgerom from Pixabay Calakmul lies so deep in the forest of southern Campeche that it was only spotted from the air, in December 1931, by the biologist Cyrus Lundell while he was surveying for a chicle company. What he had found turned out to be one of the two great powers of the Classic Maya world.
Did you know? Some 6,750 ancient structures have been identified across about 20 square kilometres, roughly 1,000 of them in the core.
18 Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral
Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México
Mexico · 1.1 km from Mexico City19.434° N 99.133° W
Image by JorgeCharcot from Pixabay Mexico's great cathedral grew slowly on the north side of the Zócalo, on ground that had been the sacred precinct of Aztec Tenochtitlan. The first small church, built in the 1520s partly with stone from the destroyed temples, soon seemed unworthy of the capital of New Spain.
Did you know? The cathedral measures roughly 128 metres long and 67 metres wide, with five naves, 51 vaults and about 150 windows.
19 Hospicio Cabañas
Mexico · 0.8 km from Guadalajara20.677° N 103.337° W
ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 metres high, one of the great mural cycles of the 20th century. The Hospicio Cabañas was founded by Bishop Juan Ruiz de Cabañas as a single institution that would serve at once as workhouse, hospital, orphanage and almshouse.
Did you know? According to a popular reading, the figures around the Man of Fire portray fellow muralists Dr. Atl, Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, with Orozco himself in the flames.
20 Temple of Kukulcan
Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.683° N 88.569° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by willysilvaquesada from Pixabay El Castillo, the Temple of Kukulcan, is the step pyramid that dominates the centre of Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatán, and archaeologists catalogue it simply as Structure 5B18. It was built by the Maya between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries and dedicated to Kukulcan, the feathered serpent of the Yucatec Maya.
Did you know? The cenote beneath the pyramid measures roughly 25 by 35 metres and may be up to 20 metres deep.
21 Sumidero Canyon
Cañón del Sumidero
Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W
Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sumidero Canyon is the gorge of the Grijalva River in central Chiapas, a cleft roughly 13 km long whose walls rise as much as 1,000 m above the water.
Did you know? Hidden in the walls are the Cave of Colours and the Cave of Silence, and a stalactite formation known as the Little Seahorse.
22 Aztec Sun Stone
Mexico · 6.1 km from Mexico City19.426° N 99.188° W
Manoj Karingamadathil · CC BY-SA 4.0 6 metres across, almost a metre thick and weighing about 24 tonnes, and it presides over the Mexica Hall of Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. The name glyph of Moctezuma II among its carvings dates it to his reign, between 1502 and 1520.
Did you know? The colossal statue of the goddess Coatlicue was unearthed in the same main square in 1790, only months before the Sun Stone.
23 Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City
Palacio de Bellas Artes
Mexico · 1.3 km from Mexico City19.435° N 99.141° W
Image by Ezequiel_Octaviano from Pixabay The Palacio de Bellas Artes is Mexico City's temple of the arts, and its history is written in its two faces. Outside it is all Art Nouveau and Neoclassical exuberance: a white marble mass, clad in stone from Carrara and from Yautepec, Inside, the lobbies and halls are crisp Art Deco.
Did you know? More than sixty notable Mexicans have lain in state in the palace, among them Frida Kahlo in 1954, Diego Rivera in 1957 and Gabriel García Márquez in 2014.
24 Mitla
Mexico · 0 km from Mitla16.917° N 96.400° W
User:Gengiskanhg · CC BY-SA 3.0 Mitla is unlike any other ancient site in Mexico because of its walls: long friezes of geometric fretwork, known as grecas, made of thousands of small cut and polished stones fitted together without mortar into stepped spirals, zigzags and meanders.
Did you know? The stone fretwork was originally set against a background of red stucco, so the patterns stood out in light and colour.
25 Pyramid of the Magician
Pirámide del Adivino
Mexico · 25.4 km from Ticul20.361° N 89.770° W
Image by darvinsantos from Pixabay The Pyramid of the Magician rises over the Maya city of Uxmal in the Puuc hills of Yucatán, and it does not look like any other pyramid in Mesoamerica.
Did you know? Hooked-nose masks of the rain god Chaac line both sides of the richly decorated western stairway.
26 Árbol del Tule
Mexico · 5.4 km from Oaxaca de Juárez17.047° N 96.636° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay El Árbol del Tule is a Montezuma cypress — an ahuehuete, "old man of the water" in Nahuatl — growing in the churchyard of Santa María del Tule, a small town in the valley of Oaxaca. 4 metres is wider than that of the largest giant sequoia. 4 metres.
Did you know? Another legend says that leaders of great nations parted towards the four cardinal points, each planting an ahuehuete, and the Tule tree is one of them.
27 Sacred Cenote
Cenote sagrado de Chichén Itzá
Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.688° N 88.568° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK · CC BY 2.0 The Sacred Cenote is a round shaft of green water sunk into the limestone at the northern edge of Chichén Itzá, and for the Maya it was nothing less than a doorway to the underworld.
28 Parícutin
Paricutín
Mexico · 20.6 km from Uruapan19.493° N 102.251° W
Image by yoliztlizama from Pixabay Parícutin is the volcano that was born in a farmer's field. On the afternoon of 20 February 1943, Dionisio Pulido and his family were clearing their cornfield near the village of Parícutin in Michoacán when the ground swelled and split open, hissing and smelling of rotten eggs.
Did you know? The first year and a bit of activity produced more than 90 per cent of all the material the volcano ever erupted.
29 Peña de Bernal
Mexico20.750° N 99.946° W
Arq. Carlos G. Calzada · CC BY-SA 4.0 Peña de Bernal rises straight out of the semi-arid hills of Querétaro state in central Mexico, a single, sheer-sided mass of grey rock that stands roughly 350 metres above the village at its foot, with its summit at about 2,510 metres above sea level.
Did you know? For the Otomí-Chichimeca, Bernal forms a sacred triangle with the nearby hills of El Zamorano and El Frontón, domes built of similar lava.
30 Yaxchilan
Yaxchilán
Mexico16.900° N 90.967° W
Jacob Rus · CC BY-SA 2.0 Yaxchilan was built inside a great horseshoe bend of the Usumacinta River, on the frontier between Mexico and Guatemala, so that water protects it on every side except a narrow neck of land to the south.
Did you know? The city's ancient name was probably Pa' Chan, meaning cleft or broken sky, while the modern name Yaxchilan means green stones.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Mexico?
- On our list, Palenque ranks first, followed by Lake Bacalar and Copper Canyon.
- What is a cenote?
- A cenote is a natural sinkhole formed when limestone collapses and exposes groundwater beneath. The Yucatán peninsula has thousands of them, and for the ancient Maya they were both the main source of fresh water and sacred places.
- Which pyramid is the largest in the world?
- By volume, the largest pyramid is the Great Pyramid of Cholula in Puebla, built in stages over many centuries. It is now largely overgrown, with the Church of Our Lady of Remedies on its summit.
- What happens at Chichén Itzá during the equinox?
- In the late afternoon around the spring and autumn equinoxes, the stepped corners of the Temple of Kukulcan cast triangles of shadow on the side of the northern staircase. Together they look like a serpent's body joining the stone snake heads at the base.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Mexico?
- In our collection, the places in Mexico are most often archaeological sites (12), churches (7), rock formations (4) and volcanoes (4).
- How many places are on this list in Mexico?
- The list covers 56 places.