Ciudad Valles
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Ciudad Valles

Ciudad Valles

Hot lowland town that is the base for the waterfalls and rivers of the Huasteca Potosina

A hot, flat sugar town on the Río Valles in the eastern lowlands of San Luis Potosí, with nothing much in it and everything around it. Ciudad Valles is where you sleep and hire a guide for the Huasteca Potosina — a limestone country of turquoise rivers, waterfalls and caves that is the best adventure destination in central Mexico and still largely visited by Mexicans rather than foreigners.

The water is the point and it is genuinely turquoise, for the same reason it is at Semuc Champey or Plitvice: limestone dissolved in the river precipitates out and the suspended calcium scatters blue light.

Within an hour or two: the Cascadas de Micos, a staircase of falls you jump down in a wetsuit and helmet; Tamul, a 105-metre waterfall reached by punting a boat two hours upstream against the current; the Sótano de las Golondrinas, a 376-metre vertical shaft out of which tens of thousands of swifts spiral every dawn; the Puente de Dios at Tamasopo; and the river at Tamasopo itself. South, towards Xilitla, is Edward James's concrete surrealist garden in the cloud forest.

Come between November and May if you want the rivers at their most blue; the summer rains turn them green and brown and close some of the sites outright. It is hot and humid all year.

Guide

Activities

Everything here is water, and the colour of it changes with the season. November to May is the dry window: rivers turquoise, levels low, every site open. From June to October the rains turn the water green or brown, raise the rivers, and close some of the waterfall jumps and the Tamul boat trip for days at a time. Operators will tell you this if you ask.

Cascadas de Micos is the one most people do first — a chain of waterfalls you descend by jumping, with a wetsuit, a helmet and a guide, the biggest drop around twelve metres. Tamul, at 105 metres the highest fall in the state, is reached by punting a wooden boat two hours up the Santa María against the current, which is slower and better than it sounds.

The Sótano de las Golondrinas at Aquismón is a sinkhole 376 metres deep and wide enough to drop the Chrysler Building into. Swifts and green parakeets spiral out of it at dawn in their tens of thousands and spiral back at dusk. Experienced cavers rappel it; everyone else watches from the lip.

Also within reach: the Puente de Dios and the river at Tamasopo, the Cascada de Tamasopo, Minas Viejas and El Salto in the north near El Naranjo, rafting on the Tampaón, and Xilitla with Las Pozas.

Guides should hold NOM-09 certification, the Mexican standard for adventure-tourism guiding. Ask. The jumps and the rappels here are real and the river does drown people.