Basaltic Prisms of Santa María Regla
Prismas basálticos de Santa María Regla
Interesting facts
- The river drops through the gorge in four permanent waterfalls, which together fall about 44 metres over the columns.
- Alexander von Humboldt visited on 21 May 1803 and drew the scene in a sketch titled 'Basaltic rocks and waterfall of Regla'.
- Artists José Gutiérrez and Fernando Brambila of the Malaspina expedition sketched the prisms in 1791, while the naturalist Antonio Pineda mistakenly placed them in Querétaro.
- In 1832 Johann Moritz Rugendas painted the canyon together with the Baron de Courcy, choosing a viewpoint facing the opposite way from Humboldt's.
- The English artist and archaeologist Adela Breton painted the basalt waterfall at Regla in 1898.
- Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the site was known simply as the 'Cascada de Regla'.
- The San Antonio Regla dam upstream, built between 1912 and 1915, changed the natural flow of water over the columns.
- The basalt contains crystals of pyroxene and olivine, and some of the columns are of a related rock called trachybasalt.
- In 2007 the prisms were chosen as one of the 'Thirteen Wonders of Mexico' in a nationwide television campaign.
Why it is worth it
In a ravine just below the town of Huasca de Ocampo, the walls are not rock faces in the usual sense but bundles of stone pillars, five- and six-sided, packed together as tightly as pencils in a box and standing some 30 to 40 metres tall. These are the Basaltic Prisms of Santa María Regla, formed roughly 2.5 million years ago when a thick flow of lava cooled slowly and contracted, cracking into regular polygons as it shrank. Each column is roughly 80 centimetres across, and behind the visible ones the cliff continues as more of the same, a whole geometry hidden in the hillside.
What makes the place unusual among columnar basalts is water. The Río San Antonio Regla, fed from a dam upstream, drops through the canyon in a series of permanent waterfalls that spill directly over the prisms, so the falling water runs down the grooves between the columns and catches the light on their facets. The lowest fall is known as the Cascada de la Rosa. Paths, staircases and suspension bridges have been built along the gorge, letting visitors look at the columns from below, from the side and from above, where the tops of the prisms form a honeycomb pavement.
The prisms have drawn artists and scientists for more than two centuries. Draughtsmen of the Spanish Malaspina expedition recorded them in 1791, Alexander von Humboldt sketched and described them in 1803 in what is considered their first published scientific account, and the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas painted them in 1832. The canyon sits on the lands of the former Hacienda de Santa María Regla, one of several silver-processing estates built in the 1760s by the mining magnate Pedro Romero de Terreros, whose stone buildings still stand nearby. Today the prisms are a geosite of the Comarca Minera UNESCO Global Geopark, recognised in 2017, and nearby Huasca de Ocampo was the first town in Mexico to be named a Pueblo Mágico, in 2001.
Getting there
The prisms are about 6 km from Huasca de Ocampo in the state of Hidalgo; the state capital, Pachuca de Soto, is about 22 km away in a straight line, with a longer drive by road. The nearest airport is Felipe Ángeles International Airport (NLU) north of Mexico City, about 72 km away; many visitors arrive instead through Mexico City International Airport (MEX) and drive north via Pachuca. The site is run as a visitor park with paths and stairways down into the ravine; expect plenty of steps.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Basaltic Prisms of Santa María Regla are tall columnar joints of basalt rock near Huasca de Ocampo in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, that line a ravine through which water runs from the San Antonio Dam. This ravine area was part of the Santa María Regla Hacienda and was first promoted by Alexander von Humboldt in 1803.
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