Las Grutas de Tolantongo
Tolantongo
Interesting facts
- Tolantongo is a misspelling: the place was Tonaltongo, from Nahuatl, until a magazine promoting it in 1975 printed the name wrongly and it stuck.
- The canyon belongs to the San Cristóbal ejido of 112 families, whose land covers about 5,200 hectares, of which only around 40 are open to visitors.
- Until a gravel road reached the caves in 1975, the site could only be reached on foot or by pack animal.
- The resort was built up without outside investors or government funding, and all its workers come from the ejido's member families.
- In 1995 the community turned down both an outside business investment plan and a proposal to declare the canyon a protected area, keeping control itself.
- The main grotto is about half the size of a tennis court, with a ceiling rising to roughly 10 metres.
- At La Gloria, a separate section run by the neighbouring La Mesa ejido, the Cola de Caballo waterfall drops about 150 metres.
- The San Cristóbal ejido was created in 1934 from the expropriated lands of the hacienda La Florida.
- Scientists were already studying the canyon in the 1940s, decades before it became a destination.
Why it is worth it
In the dry hills of the Mezquital Valley in Hidalgo, where the landscape is mostly cactus and scrub, a box canyon with walls up to about 500 metres high hides a warm, milky-turquoise river. Tolantongo takes its name from the Nahuatl for a place where it feels warm, and the description is literal: water heated inside the mountain to around 37 °C pours out of a cave mouth high in the canyon wall and runs down to the valley floor, cooling as it goes. Mineral salts give the river its improbable pale blue colour.
The main grotto is a karst cave hung with stalactites and stalagmites, and the warm water that rises inside it flows out of the cave mouth as a shallow stream. Next to it a short tunnel, about 15 metres long, fills with vapour like a natural steam bath. Below the cave mouth, rimstone pools built by the mineral-laden water step down the slope, and the river itself is warm enough to wade and float in for long stretches. Higher up the canyon wall, a series of man-made pools has been built into the canyon wall, looking out across the gorge.
What sets Tolantongo apart is the contrast between the parched country above and the lush, steaming canyon below, and the fact that you can follow the warm water from where it emerges inside the mountain all the way to the river. The site is run by a local ejido cooperative of families who own the surrounding land; only a small part of their holdings is open to visitors, with hotels, campgrounds and restaurants grouped along the river. A separate section called La Gloria has three natural pools of different temperatures.
Getting there
The nearest town is Ixmiquilpan, about 29 km away, in the Mezquital Valley of Hidalgo; Mexico City lies about 200 km to the south by road, and Pachuca roughly an hour and a half away. The nearest international airport is Felipe Angeles International Airport (NLU), about 100 km away. Buses run from Mexico City to Ixmiquilpan, and from there smaller buses go down into the canyon several times a day; drivers take the road from Ixmiquilpan via the village of El Cardonal, whose final section winds steeply down the canyon side.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Tolantongo is a box canyon and resort located 17 kilometres from Ixmiquilpan on Route 27 in the Mezquital Valley, State of Hidalgo in Mexico, It is about 1.5 hours northwest of Pachuca and 198 km or three-to-four hours north of Mexico City. The closest village to the resort is called El Cardonal and it is part of Cardonal Municipality.
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