Tabasco is Mexico's wettest state: rivers, swamp and rain for most of the year, which is why the Olmec, the first complex civilisation in Mesoamerica, grew up here from about 1500 BC.
Villahermosa is the capital, an oil city built on humidity, and it holds Parque La Venta — an outdoor museum where the Olmec colossal heads were moved when the original site was threatened by drilling. The heads are basalt, up to three metres and twenty tonnes, carved with portrait features and hauled from quarries eighty kilometres away by people without the wheel.
Comalcalco is the only major Maya city built of fired brick, because the delta has no stone — and many of the bricks carry the marks and messages of their makers. The surrounding plantations grow cacao, which the Maya used as currency, and several can be visited.
Tenosique in the east is the starting point for the Usumacinta river and its border crossing to the Petén; its pre-Lenten Danza del Pochó is one of the stranger carnivals in Mexico.
The heat and the mosquitoes are not incidental — this is a state to visit in the drier months from December to April.
