Copper Canyon
Barrancas del Cobre
Interesting facts
- The canyon system is made up of six main canyons cut by six rivers, and covers roughly 65,000 square kilometres.
- The Spanish name Tarahumara derives from Rarámuri, the people's own word, which some scholars interpret as meaning the running people.
- Many Rarámuri move with the seasons, spending summer on the cool heights and descending into the warm canyon bottoms for the winter.
- 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.
- Near Témoris the railway loops across the same valley three times, using a tunnel more than a kilometre long to gain height.
- The highest point on the line is not Creel but San Juanito, at about 2,405 metres.
- Batopilas was founded by the Spanish around 1632 to mine silver at the bottom of its canyon.
- Piedra Volada, falling roughly 366 metres, is often cited as Mexico's highest waterfall, while nearby Basaseachi drops about 256 metres.
- Mexican Douglas firs grow on the plateaus above about 2,400 metres, while fig trees and palms thrive on the tropical canyon floors far below.
- Christopher McDougall's 2009 bestseller Born to Run brought worldwide attention to the Rarámuri runners of these canyons.
Why it is worth it
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. Taken together the network is far larger in area than the Grand Canyon, and its deepest branch, the Urique canyon, falls about 1,879 metres, the deepest in Mexico. The name comes from the copper-green tones of the canyon walls. The high country along the rims is alpine, with mild weather in spring and autumn, while the canyon floors below stay warm and humid all year, so a single descent crosses several climates.
This is the homeland of the Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, a people of perhaps seventy thousand famous for endurance running; their traditional rarajípari race is run over long distances while kicking a wooden ball along canyon paths. The Spanish came for silver: Batopilas, deep in its own gorge at about 600 metres, was a mining centre from the seventeenth century and is now one of Mexico's designated Pueblos Mágicos. The wider sierra also holds some of the country's tallest waterfalls, including Basaseachi and Piedra Volada.
The canyons are best known through the Chihuahua–Pacific railway, El Chepe, which took most of a century to finish and opened throughout in 1961. It runs between Chihuahua and Los Mochis, climbing through dozens of bridges and some 86 tunnels, with Creel, at around 2,350 metres, among its highest stops. At Divisadero the train pauses at the rim above the Urique canyon, and next to it the Barrancas del Cobre Adventure Park sends a cable car about 3 km across the void, alongside long zip lines hung hundreds of metres above the canyon.
Getting there
The nearest large town is Cuauhtémoc, about 130 km from the canyons; the closest airport by straight line, Ciudad Obregón (CEN), is some 205 km away across the sierra, and most visitors instead fly into Chihuahua's General Roberto Fierro Villalobos International Airport (CUU) or start from Los Mochis at the other end of the railway. El Chepe links both ends with stops at Creel and Divisadero; by road, Divisadero is about 50 km from Creel. The trip from Chihuahua city to the canyons takes around five hours by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Copper Canyon is a system of six distinct canyons in the Sierra Madre Occidental in the southwestern part of the state of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico that is 65,000 square kilometres (25,000 sq mi) in size. The canyons were formed by six rivers that drain the western side of the Sierra Tarahumara. All six rivers merge into the Rio Fuerte and empty into the Gulf of California. The walls of the canyon are a copper/green color, which is the origin of the name.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
27.51611, -107.76583per Wikidata